Data collection and analysis of Mapudungun morphology for spelling
correction

Lori Levin, Rodolfo Vega, Christian Monson, Ralf Brown, Ariadna Font
Llitjos, Alon Lavie, Jaime Carbonell

Language Technologies Institute 
Carnegie Mellon University

Eliseo Cañulef, Rosendo Huisca

Instituto de Estudios Indígenas
Universidad de La Frontera

Carolina Huenchullán, Claudio Millacura
Programa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe
Ministerio de Educación de Chile


This paper describes part of a three year collaboration between
Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, the Programa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe of the 
Chilean Ministry of Education, and Universidad de La Frontera (Temuco,
Chile).  In a previous paper (Levin et al., 2001) we provided an
overview of the project.  In this paper, we will focus on the
preparation of corpora and lexica that will support a spelling
corrector for Mapudungun.

Mapudungun is the language of over 900,000 Mapuche people in Chile and
Argentina.   The language is polysynthetic with noun incorporation.  A
verb consists of a stem plus .....  Our project has scientific and
social significance.  The scientific novelty of the project is in the
application of computational tools (such as morphological analysis,
Example-Based Machine Translation, and Transfer Based MT) to a
polysynthetic language.   We are also working on new techniques for
automatically learning transfer rules from word-aligned bilingual
data.  (!!!!!!!!!CITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

The social significance of the project is related to the The Chilean
Ministry of Education's commitment to bilingual education in Spanish
and Mapudungun for Mapuche children.  Computer-based tools are a
welcome part of the bilingual education program.  Chile's ENLACES project, an education electronic network,
provides computers and networking to all Chilean schools, even
those in rural areas.  

The CMU-Chile project, {\sc Avenue}-Mapudungun, is planning two tools
for the near future: an on-line lexicon with examples of usage from
the corpus of spoken Mapudungun, and a spelling checker for Mapudungun
based on MYSPELL???  Following are details of the corpora and lexica:

The Corpus of Spoken Mapudungun:  In the last three years, the Chilean
Ministry of Education and CMU's {\sc Avenue} project
(!!!!CITATIONS!!!!) have supported the collection of 170 hours of
spoken Mapudungun.  The recordings (all on the topic of health care)
have been transcribed and translated into Spanish at the Instituto de
Estudios Indígenas at Universidad de La Frontera.  The corpus covers
three dialects of Mapudungun,  120 hours of Nguluche, 30 hours of Lafkenche and 20 hours of Pewenche.
The corpus is described in more detail in Levin et al. 2001.

Full Form Word List: The 80,000 most frequent full form Mapudungun
words (stem plus inflections) were extracted from the corpus of spoken
Mapudungun.  The 80,000 words were checked for spelling using spelling
conventions that were devised by Mapuche linguists at Universidad de
La Frontera.  (There is not yet a universally accepted orthography for
Mapudungun.)  

Bilingual Lexicon:  Each entry in the bilingual lexicon consists of a
full form Mapudungun word, segmentation of the word into morphemes,
a gloss for each morpheme, a Spanish translation of the word, a
Mapudungun sentence containing the word from the corpus of spoken
Mapudungun, and a Spanish translation of the sentence.  Currently,
there are about ??????? words in the lexicon.  The lexicon is in a
very general text only format that can be re-configured for any
computer-based lexicon interface.