Low hanging fruit and the Boasian trilogy in digital lexicography of morphologically rich languages: Lessons from a survey of Indigenous language resources in Canada

Online lexicographical resources for the morphologically rich Indigenous languages in Canada use a wide range of strategies for conveying their language’s morphological system, i.e. how words are inflected and derived, which this paper illustrates in a survey of seventeen bilingual online resources. The strategies these resources employ boil down to two basic approaches to the underlying structure of the resource: 1) a lexical database, or 2) a computational model. Most resources we surveyed are constructed around lexical databases. These assume the word(form) as the basic unit, an assumption that makes it difficult to incorporate the language’s sub-word, morphological structure in full detail. However, one resource uses a computational morphological model to bring the language’s morphology into the core of the lexicon – this proved to be a “low-hanging fruit” in the application of language technology that had been accomplished within a reasonable time-frame, as has been advocated by Trond Trosterud. We discuss the value created and questions raised by this approach and argue that it successfully overcomes the traditional Boasian three-way partition of dictionary, grammar, and text, creating integrated language resources that meet the modern needs of low-resource endangered languages and their communities.