Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea

TL;DR

Vavanagi is a community-led platform that enables crowdsourced translation and documentation of the Hula language, fostering cultural preservation and community involvement in language technology.

Contribution

It introduces the first fully community-governed language technology platform for a small language, with a multi-level framework for measuring community engagement.

Findings

Over 12,000 sentence pairs created

77 translators and 4 reviewers involved

Community-led governance model implemented

Abstract

We present Vavanagi, a community-run platform for Hula (Vula'a), an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea with approximately 10,000 speakers. Vavanagi supports crowdsourced English-Hula text translation and voice recording, with elder-led review and community-governed data infrastructure. To date, 77 translators and 4 reviewers have produced over 12k parallel sentence pairs covering 9k unique Hula words. We also propose a multi-level framework for measuring community involvement, from consultation to fully community-initiated and governed projects. We position Vavanagi at Level 5: initiative, design, implementation, and data governance all sit within the Hula community, making it, to our knowledge, the first community-led language technology initiative for a language of this size. Vavanagi shows how language technology can bridge village-based and urban members, connect generations, and support cultural heritage on the community's own terms.