Creating lexical resources for polysynthetic languages—the case of Arapaho

This paper discusses the challenges in creating pedagogical and research resources for the Arapaho language. Because of the complex morphology of this language, printed resources cannot provide the typical useful functions that they can for many other languages. We discuss the challenges faced by most learners and researchers working with polysynthetic languages, of which Arapaho is an excellent example, as well as some currently implemented solutions in creating computer resources for this language, including a lexical database, a morphological parser, and a concordancer. The construction of the finite-state morphological parser which many downstream tasks rely on will be discussed in some detail.

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