Educational Tools for Mapuzugun
This work addresses the exclusion of Mapuzugun from education in Chile and Argentina, supporting language revitalization efforts for the Mapuche community, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing computational linguistics methods.
The paper tackles the revitalization of Mapuzugun, an endangered indigenous language, by developing an educational tool with an orthography detector/converter, morphological analyzer, and informal translator, and reports promising results from a case study with students.
Mapuzugun is the language of the Mapuche people. Due to political and historical reasons, its number of speakers has decreased and the language has been excluded from the educational system in Chile and Argentina. For this reason, it is very important to support the revitalization of the Mapuzugun in all spaces and media of society. In this work we present a tool towards supporting educational activities of Mapuzugun, tailored to the characteristics of the language. The tool consists of three parts: design and development of an orthography detector and converter; a morphological analyzer; and an informal translator. We also present a case study with Mapuzugun students showing promising results. Short Abstract in Mapuzuzgun: Tüfachi küzaw pegelfi kiñe zugun küzawpeyüm kelluaetew pu mapuzugun chillkatufe kimal kizu tañi zugun.