The Harrington Yowlumne Narrative Corpus
This work addresses the lack of resources for minority language development, specifically for the Yowlumne community and researchers, but is incremental as it focuses on digitizing existing materials.
The authors tackled the problem of inaccessible handwritten materials for minority languages by creating the Harrington Yowlumne Narrative Corpus, resulting in a digitized corpus of 20 narrative texts with 57,136 transcribed characters and 10,719 gold-standard normalized words.
Minority languages continue to lack adequate resources for their development, especially in the technological domain. Likewise, the J.P. Harrington Papers collection at the Smithsonian Institution are difficult to access in practical terms for community members and researchers due to its handwritten and disorganized format. Our current work seeks to make a portion of this publicly-available yet problematic material practically accessible for natural language processing use. Here, we present the Harrington Yowlumne Narrative Corpus, a corpus of 20 narrative texts that derive from the Tejoneño Yowlumne community of the Tinliw rancheria in Kern County, California between 1910 and 1925. We digitally transcribe the texts and, through a Levenshtein distance-based algorithm and manual checking, we provide gold-standard aligned normalized and lemmatized text. We likewise provide POS tags for each lemmatized token via a lexicon-based deterministic approach. Altogether, the corpus contains 57,136 transcribed characters aligned with 10,719 gold standard text-normalized words.