"Computer Linguistics in Nahuatl and Mayan Languages"
Joe Campbell's Nahuatl Project
In an effort to revitalize the study of indigenous languages, Joe Campbell, a leading authority in Nahuatl Studies and long associated with IU, presented his "Project on the Molina Dictionaries / Florentine Codex Vocabulary (Sixteenth Century Nahuatl)." This project involves synthesizing the vocabulary material in Molina and the Florentine to make it as accessible and useful as possible. That includes doing a morphological description for every word, an English translation of one of the three Molina dictionaries (which will integrate into the other two), breaking the text structure of the Florentine Codex into individual vocabulary items and integrating them with the Molina material. The Florentine database allows for concordances of words in their sentence context or even morphemes in their sentence context. It has been used on a consultation basis by many scholars for several years.
Discussion after Joe's talk centered on how he might start making these materials available to interested to scholars and to members of Nahuatl-speaking communities. Naturally, the MLCP website came up as one immediate venue, but long-term solutions were also presented and evaluated.
Mike Gasser's Maya Project
In the second presentation Mike Gasser, Associate Professor in Computer Science Department at Indiana University, discussed his project on "Computational linguistics in Mayan languages" of Guatemala, specifically in the area of verb morphology. Indigenous languages, already under threat from competition from the languages around them, run the risk of becoming even more vulnerable as their speakers find these languages of little use in the digital world. Computational linguistics, one of the products of the Digital Revolution, could play a role in addressing the Linguistic Digital Divide, specifically as a means of translating between different Maya languages -- the hope is that inter-dialect translation will avoid some of the pitfalls evident in machine translation. Gasser proposed that computational linguistics could provide the basis for spell checkers and search engines for these languages; more ambitiously, machine translation could aid in translation of material into and out of the languages.
Discussion after Mike's talk centered on the manifold problems created by dialectal differences in indigenous settings in Latin America, and how his work on this Maya project holds promise for other linguistic areas, including the vast Quechua-speaking zone in South America.
