Challenges of language technologies for the indigenous languages of the Americas
It addresses the problem of technological neglect for indigenous languages, which is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper reviews existing research, digital resources, and NLP systems for indigenous languages of the Americas, highlighting the challenges posed by their diversity and low-resource scenarios to encourage more NLP work in this area.
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.