Woods Cree (nîhithawîwin): A Grammatical Description and Computational Modelling

• Author / Creator

  Dacanay, Daniel B.

• In writing this thesis, I aim to accomplish three primary objectives, all of which are intended to increase the quality and quantity of language resources available in Woods Cree (nîhithawîwin, ISO:cwd). Firstly, I provide here a thorough descriptive overview of the Woods Cree phonological and morphological systems, describing in detail their mutual interactions and variations across geographic and cross-generational lines. Secondly, I describe the compilation of an online, bilingual Woods Cree-English corpus, containing tens of thousands of tokens from geographically, diachronically, and stylistically diverse sources, making use of this corpus throughout to evaluate various phenomena in the language. Thirdly, I describe the synthesis of my metalinguistic findings into a computational model of Woods Cree morphology, capable of both recognising and generating inflected wordforms in the language. In turn, this model was used to create a morphologically intelligent online dictionary of Woods Cree (https://itwiwina.altlab.dev/), adapted from existing computational tools created for the related dialect of Plains Cree.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Cree
  • Language Revitalisation
  • Morphology
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Language Documentation
  • Corpus

• Graduation date

  Fall 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-z96a-cg51

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.