A Morphological Transducer for the Limbu Language

Abstract

This paper presents the first ever morphological transducer for the Limbu language, also known by its endonym Yakthung Pan, an endangered Sino-Tibetan language primarily spoken in the area known as Limbuwan/Koshi Province in Eastern Nepal, with a minority population in the Sikkim state of India, where Limbu enjoys official status. Using a corpus of Limbu text produced by field interviews (Michailovsky, 1977), and a translation of the Holy Bible into the Limbu language, the paper presents various elements of the morphology of the language, how they were implemented into the transducer, and an evaluation of the transducer against identified corpora and a gold standard. With a relatively small lexicon, the transducer was found to have reasonable coverage, with high precision but low recall. The paper discusses future expansion through further involvement with the community, which can help in the maintenance and revitalisation of the endangered language.

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