Kawennon:nis: the Wordmaker for Kanyen'keha

摘要

In this paper we describe preliminary work on Kawennon:ms, a verb conjugator for Kanyen'keha (Ohsweken dialect). The project is the result of a collaboration between Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa Kanyen'keha immersion school and the Canadian National Research Council's Indigenous Language Technology lab. The purpose of Kawennon:nis is to build on the educational successes of the Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa school and develop a tool that assists students in learning how to conjugate verbs in Kanyen'keha; a skill that is essential to mastering the language. Kawennon:nis is implemented with both web and mobile front-ends that communicate with an application programming interface that in turn communicates with a symbolic language model implemented as a finite state transducer. Eventually, it will serve as a foundation for several other applications for both Kanyen'keha and other Iroquoian languages.