Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea
This addresses the need for preserving the Hula language and cultural heritage for its approximately 10,000 speakers, positioning it as the first community-led language technology initiative for a language of this size.
The researchers tackled the problem of documenting the Hula language in Papua New Guinea by developing Vavanagi, a community-run platform for crowdsourced translation and voice recording, resulting in over 12,000 parallel sentence pairs covering 9,000 unique Hula words produced by 77 translators and 4 reviewers.
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.