Challenges of language technologies for the indigenous languages of the Americas

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of language technologies for indigenous American languages, highlighting challenges, resource limitations, and research gaps to encourage further NLP development in these diverse, low-resource languages.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing research, resources, and challenges for indigenous American languages, emphasizing the need for focused NLP efforts in low-resource, linguistically diverse contexts.

Findings

Indigenous American languages are underrepresented in NLP research.

Significant resource and technological gaps exist for these languages.

The paper identifies key challenges and research questions for future work.

Abstract

Indigenous languages of the American continent are highly diverse. However, they have received little attention from the technological perspective. In this paper, we review the research, the digital resources and the available NLP systems that focus on these languages. We present the main challenges and research questions that arise when distant languages and low-resource scenarios are faced. We would like to encourage NLP research in linguistically rich and diverse areas like the Americas.