Nawatl Context-Free Grammars for Natural Language Processing

Abstract

The aim of this article is to introduce Context-Free Grammars (CFG) for the Nawatl language. Nawatl is an Amerindian language of the π-language type, i.e. a language with few digital resources. For this reason the corpora available for the learning of Large Language Models (LLMs) are virtually non-existent, posing a significant challenge. The goal is to produce a substantial number of syntactically valid artificial Nawatl sentences and thereby to expand the corpora for the purpose of learning embeddings (static models or probably LLMs). For this objective, we introduce two new Nawatl CFGs and use them in generative mode. Thanks to these grammars, it is possible to expand Nawatl corpus significantly and subsequently to use it to learn embeddings (such as FastText) and to evaluate their relevance in semantic similarity tasks. The results show an improvement compared to the results obtained using only the original corpus without artificial expansion, and also demonstrate that economic embeddings often perform better than some LLMs.

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