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This paper describes ongoing work to develop a corpus of Cahuilla language from the John Peabody Harrington collection, which contains linguistic and ethnographic fieldnotes documenting Indigenous languages of California and other regions across the Americas. Handwritten notes present numerous processing challenges, including scratch-outs, multilingual entries in Spanish and other Indigenous languages, unique abbreviations, and varying script orientations. We compare the efficacy of deep learning text recognition models to convert images of the notes into a machine-readable format, with a focus on respecting tribal data sovereignty in our methods. We find that Pylaia is the most accurate model for our data. Finally, we present the preliminary findings and indicate future directions for developing a Cahuilla corpus.

ACL 2026

Towards a Community-accessible Cahuilla corpus: Developing HTR for J.P. Harrington&#39;s handwritten fieldnotes on Mountain Cahuilla

Towards a Community-accessible Cahuilla corpus: Developing HTR for J.P. Harrington's handwritten fieldnotes on Mountain Cahuilla

workshop paper

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

In this paper, we aim to answer the following question: could corpus duplication be useful in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for low-resource languages? In these languages (or pi-languages), corpora available for training Large Language Models are virtually non-existent. Specifically, we study the impact of corpus expansion in Nahuatl, an agglutinative and polysynthetic Amerindian pi-language characterised by extensive dialectal variation. Our goal is to increase the size of Nahuatl corpora, which currently consist of a limited number of tokens, through controlled duplication techniques. Our experimental setup employs incremental duplication alongside appropriate corpus balancing, with the objective of training embeddings optimised for downstream NLP tasks. Consequently, static embeddings were trained and evaluated on a sentence-level semantic similarity task. Our results show a significant improvement in performance when incremental duplication is applied, compared to results obtained without corpus expansion. To our knowledge, this technique has not yet been explored in this field.

Corpora duplication for NLP in low-resource languages: A case study of Nahuatl

We present a morphosyntactically controlled transformation dataset for Quechua Collao and evaluate large language models on a sentence-level transformation task under varying prompting conditions. Results show that performance depends on the interaction between model behavior, context size, and linguistic complexity, with smaller models benefiting more from additional examples and morphological hints providing selective gains.

On the Robustness of Morphosyntactic Transformation with Large Language Models: The Case of Quechua Collao

The preservation of under-resourced languages requires digital tools and resources shaped by and for their speakers. We present the first dedicated ASR resources for Puno Quechua (ISO 639-3: qxp): (1) the largest speech corpus for any single Quechua variety, consisting in 66 hours of recordings for scripted and spontaneous speech (including 36 hours of manually transcribed and validated data), collected via a participatory design campaign; (2) the first systematic ASR benchmark for Puno Quechua, evaluating state-of-the-art models and fine-tuning Whisper-base, wav2vec2-base, and XLS-R-300M, with and without continued pre-training (CPT); (3) an open release of all datasets and fine-tuned models.

Building Community-Centred NLP Resources for Puno Quechua

In the context of real-world language technology applications, the language or variety in which a given text is written is often unknown or uncertain. Yet, this information is crucial in order to adequately select and apply appropriate models or resources. Language identification (LID), or the process of determining the language or variety of a text sample, is thus often an important fundamental task in natural language processing. LID can be particularly challenging when: (1) there are not many labeled texts for training; and (2) similar or related languages are involved, since these may share a number of surface-level features. In this paper, we present an LID system for Nahuatl, a group of closely-related language varieties spoken in Mexico and Central America. Nahuatl LID involves both of the aforementioned challenges: Nahuatl varieties can be quite similar, sharing morphemes and even many lexical items, and there is a relative paucity of representative, variant-labeled Nahuatl text. We describe LID experiments for a total of 11 Nahuatl varieties, achieving generally good results (90.59% ±0.09% in 5-fold cross-validation experiments). Many of the outstanding errors are the result of confusion between three highly similar Huasteca variants.

The Power of Simplicity: N-Grams and Transformers in Nahuatl Language Identification

The term "low-resource" is used pervasively in NLP but communicates almost nothing precise. We propose RAN (Resource Abundance Notation), a compact, multi-dimensional notation for quantifying a language's NLP resource profile. A RAN score is written as S/M/L_1-B_1/L_2-B_2/..., where S = floor(log10(speakers)), M = floor(log10(monolingual sentences)), and each L_i-B_i pair records a bilingual partner and floor(log10(parallel sentences)). Values derive from canonical sources: Wikidata for speakers, OSCAR 23.01 for monolingual corpora, and (where available) OPUS for parallel corpora. We score 20 typologically diverse languages and correlate each profile against published benchmarks for three tasks: machine translation (MT, via NLLB-200 chrF++), named entity recognition (NER, via XTREME XLM-R WikiANN F1), and part-of-speech tagging (POS, via XTREME XLM-R UD accuracy). The RAN components carry complementary information: a linear model using all three explains 52% of MT variance, 76% of NER variance, and 72% of POS variance. Among single predictors, B_max (the largest bilingual corpus, regardless of partner) is strongest for the cross-lingual transfer tasks (NER, POS), while M and B_en are strongest for MT. RAN is designed first as a communication tool, not a predictive model.

RAN: Resource Abundance Notation for Languages in NLP

For Mapudungun arn→es translation, morphology-aware tokenization can substitute for a 5× increase in model parameters. We fine-tune three sizes of Meta's NLLB-200 on Mapudungun–Spanish translation across eight tokenization strategies, including our novel Morfessor-VC method, which
constrains Morfessor morpheme segmentation to tokens already present in NLLB's pretrained
vocabulary. Our 600M Morfessor-VC model is competitive with our own fine-tuned 3.3B Standard BPE model on arn→es (43.2 vs. 42.9 chrF++, ∆ = +0.3, p = 0.039, 95% CI [0.02, 0.60]) while using five times fewer parameters, and all fine-tuned conditions surpass frontier LLMs by over 27 chrF++. Mapudungun is an indigenous polysynthetic language spoken by 200,000+ Mapuche people in Chile and Argentina, absent from NLLB-200 and not supported by major commercial MT providers; prior work predates large-scale multilingual models and does not address the tokenization challenges posed by its agglutinative
morphology. These results establish new state-of-the-art baselines for Mapudungun MT and provide a practical foundation for community language tools in pedagogy, social media, and language revitalization.

Bringing Mapudungun into the Modern MT Ecosystem: Morphology-Aware Tokenization for NLLB-200 Fine-Tuning

Qom, a language of the Guaycuruan family, is a low-resource language for NLP and speech processing. We present the first parallel Qom–Spanish corpus in a computationally usable format, comprising 33,392 parallel segments, totaling 1,469,905 Qom tokens and 891,344 Spanish tokens. A subset of 2,943 segments excludes Bible-derived content. It includes alignments at different levels: sentences, sentence fragments, and paragraphs, and is compiled from multiple sources, both previously available and newly collected. 
We also present bidirectional neural machine translation baselines based on NLLB-200, achieving competitive performance in both translation directions on the full dataset, and lower performance on the non-Bible subset. An ablation study shows that training exclusively on biblical data reduces performance on non-biblical text, highlighting the importance of domain diversity in low-resource machine translation.

QomL'aqtaqa: A Qom–Spanish Parallel Corpus for Natural Language Processing with Machine Translation Evaluation

Publicly available spoken language identification (LID) systems provide sparse and inconsistent coverage of indigenous languages of the Americas and languages of the Pacific Islands. No system on HuggingFace covers Central Alaskan Yup'ik except the largest variant of Meta's MMS-LID family, and only three MMS-LID variants cover Samoan, while Whisper and VoxLingua107-based models lack both despite including other Polynesian languages. We describe an ongoing effort to build a coarse-labeled LID dataset for Yup'ik and Samoan from US public broadcast archives, benchmark publicly available LID systems on it, and train a simple MLP classifier on frozen wav2vec~2.0 representations as a prototype. We report preliminary corpus statistics, off-the-shelf model performance, and prototype results. Guided by the distinctive phonological typology of the target languages, we outline a phonologically-informed fine-tuning direction as future work.

Toward a Coarse-Labeled Spoken Language Identification Dataset for Central Alaskan Yup'ik and Samoan from US Broadcast Archives

This system description presents a Wixarika image captioning system for the AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task on Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages. The system uses Spanish as a pivot language, combining CLIP-based image retrieval, Qwen3-VL Spanish caption generation, the official Sheffield-compatible Spanish-to-Wixarika MT model, and character n-gram language-model reranking. We report local 5-fold development results, official test results, error analysis, and implementation details for reproducibility.

6fanle Submission to the AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task on Wixarika Image Captioning

Culturally grounded image captioning for under-resourced Indigenous languages is challenging due to severe data scarcity and the need to describe culturally specific visual content. This paper describes our submission to the AmericasNLP 2026 shared task, where we evaluate two architectural paradigms for caption generation across Bribri, Guaraní, Yucatec Maya, Wixárika, and Orizaba Nahuatl. First, we implement a cascaded system that combines a large vision-language model with a machine translation pipeline, showing that culturally contextualized, persona-based prompting improves over the official baseline in most comparable settings. Second, we develop a direct, end-to-end Single-stage approach by adapting PaliGemma 2 using LoRA fine-tuning, continued pre-training, and multilingual joint training. Our single-stage experiments show that, despite severe domain mismatch and reliance on synthetic training data, multilingual training and continued pre-training improve automatic chrF++ relative to single-language LoRA fine-tuning in some settings. Overall, cascaded pipelines remain the strongest among the evaluated approaches under current data constraints, while single-stage models remain a promising but currently data-limited path toward direct Indigenous-language image captioning.

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