Ve'rdd. Narrowing the Gap between Paper Dictionaries, Low-Resource NLP and Community Involvement
This system addresses the challenge of digitizing and improving dictionaries for endangered minority languages, specifically for native speakers and dictionary editors who may lack technical understanding.
The paper introduces Ve'rdd, an open-source online dictionary editing system designed to facilitate the re-evaluation and editing of grassroots dictionaries for endangered minority languages like Skolt Sami. It aims to bridge the gap between community involvement and state-of-the-art finite-state language descriptions by masking technical complexities behind a user-friendly interface.
We present an open-source online dictionary editing system, Ve'rdd, that offers a chance to re-evaluate and edit grassroots dictionaries that have been exposed to multiple amateur editors. The idea is to incorporate community activities into a state-of-the-art finite-state language description of a seriously endangered minority language, Skolt Sami. Problems involve getting the community to take part in things above the pencil-and-paper level. At times, it seems that the native speakers and the dictionary oriented are lacking technical understanding to utilize the infrastructures which might make their work more meaningful in the future, i.e. multiple reuse of all of their input. Therefore, our system integrates with the existing tools and infrastructures for Uralic language masking the technical complexities behind a user-friendly UI.