Annotated Speech Corpus for Low Resource Indian Languages: Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj and Magahi

In this paper we discuss an in-progress work on the development of a speech corpus for four low-resource Indo-Aryan languages -- Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj and Magahi using the field methods of linguistic data collection. The total size of the corpus currently stands at approximately 18 hours (approx. 4-5 hours each language) and it is transcribed and annotated with grammatical information such as part-of-speech tags, morphological features and Universal dependency relationships. We discuss our methodology for data collection in these languages, most of which was done in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with one of the aims being to generate some additional income for low-income groups speaking these languages. In the paper, we also discuss the results of the baseline experiments for automatic speech recognition system in these languages.

UniMorph 4.0: Universal Morphology

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

Developing Universal Dependency Treebanks for Magahi and Braj

In this paper, we discuss the development of treebanks for two low-resourced Indian languages - Magahi and Braj based on the Universal Dependencies framework. The Magahi treebank contains 945 sentences and Braj treebank around 500 sentences marked with their lemmas, part-of-speech, morphological features and universal dependencies. This paper gives a description of the different dependency relationship found in the two languages and give some statistics of the two treebanks. The dataset will be made publicly available on Universal Dependency (UD) repository (https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Magahi-MGTB/tree/master) in the next(v2.10) release.