ISCA Archive SIGUL 2023
ISCA Archive SIGUL 2023

Community Internally-driven Corpus Buildings. Three Examples from the Breton Ecosystem

Mélanie Jouitteau

This paper is a position paper concerning corpus-building strategies in minoritized languages in the Global North. It draws attention to the structure of the non-technical community of speakers, and concretely addresses how their needs can inform the design of technical solutions. Celtic Breton is taken as a case study for its relatively small speaker community, which is rather well-connected to modern technical infrastructures, and is bilingual with a non-English language (French). I report on three different community internal initiatives that have the potential to facilitate the growth of NLP-ready corpora in FAIR practices (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability). These initiatives follow a careful analysis of the Breton NLP situation both inside and outside of academia, and take advantage of pre-existing dynamics. They are integrated to the speaking community, both on small and larger scales. They have in common the goal of creating an environment that fosters virtuous circles, in which various actors help each other. It is the interactions between these actors that create quality- enriched corpora usable for NLP, once some low-cost technical solutions are provided. This work aims at providing an estimate of the community’s internal potential to grow its own pool of resources, provided the right NLP resource gathering tools and ecosystem design. Some projects reported here are in the early stages of conception, while others build on decade-long society/research interfaces for the building of resources. All call for feedback from both NLP researchers and the speaking communities, contributing to building bridges and fruitful collaborations between these two groups.


doi: 10.21437/SIGUL.2023-22

Cite as: Jouitteau, M. (2023) Community Internally-driven Corpus Buildings. Three Examples from the Breton Ecosystem . Proc. 2nd Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA SIG on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL 2023), 103-107, doi: 10.21437/SIGUL.2023-22

@inproceedings{jouitteau23_sigul,
  author={Mélanie Jouitteau},
  title={{Community Internally-driven Corpus Buildings. Three Examples from the Breton Ecosystem }},
  year=2023,
  booktitle={Proc. 2nd Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA SIG on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL 2023)},
  pages={103--107},
  doi={10.21437/SIGUL.2023-22}
}