This paper describes efforts to annotate a dataset of verbs in the Iroquoian language Kanien’kéha (a.k.a. Mohawk) using the UniMorph schema (Batsuren et al. 2022a). It is based on the output of a symbolic model - a hand-built verb conjugator. Morphological constituents of each verb are automatically annotated with UniMorph tags. Overall the process was smooth but some central features of the language did not fall neatly into the schema which resulted in a large number of custom tags and a somewhat ad hoc mapping process. We think the same difficulties are likely to arise for other Iroquoian languages and perhaps other North American language families. This paper describes our decision making process with respect to Kanien’kéha and reports preliminary results of morphological induction experiments using the dataset.

This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.

In this paper we describe preliminary work on Kawennón:nis, a verb conjugator for Kanyen’kéha (Ohsweken dialect). The project is the result of a collaboration between Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa Kanyen’kéha immersion school and the Canadian National Research Council’s Indigenous Language Technology lab. The purpose of Kawennón: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’kéha; a skill that is essential to mastering the language. Kawennón: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’kéha and other Iroquoian languages.

In this article, we discuss which text, speech, and image technologies have been developed, and would be feasible to develop, for the approximately 60 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada. In particular, we concentrate on technologies that may be feasible to develop for most or all of these languages, not just those that may be feasible for the few most-resourced of these. We assess past achievements and consider future horizons for Indigenous language transliteration, text prediction, spell-checking, approximate search, machine translation, speech recognition, speaker diarization, speech synthesis, optical character recognition, and computer-aided language learning.