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In this paper we describe semantic fieldwork undertaken from a distance with speakers of Akuzipik (also known as (Siberian) Yupik), an endangered Alaska Native language. We present our experiences in working both synchronously and asynchronously on temporal reference, quantification, lexical semantics of derivational morphology, and antipassives with speakers via Facebook Messenger, text message, email, mail, and telephone. We detail a number of logistical, methodological, and interpersonal challenges and benefits to conducting semantic fieldwork via these means both during the global pandemic and before/after. While fieldworkers have found the situation more challenging than in-person fieldwork in many ways, scheduling time with speakers is easier, and some speakers favor the extra time afforded them to think about their answers. Relationships among fieldworkers and speakers have benefitted from more extended interactions than are possible during in-person trips, and fieldworkers have been able to engage with speakers who had been unavailable during in-person visits. 

We measure 95.6±0.3% storage efficiency of ultrafast photons in a collisionally broadened barium vapor quantum memory. We measure 31±1% total efficiency, limited by control field power, and a 0.515(6) ns lifetime, limited by motional dephasing.

 

Akuzipik (Yupigestun/Yupik/St. Lawrence Island Yupik/Siberian Yupik/Chaplinski Yupik) is an endangered language belonging to the Yupik branch of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family. It is currently spoken by 800-900 people in the Bering Strait region, mainly on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), and on the coast of the Chukotka Peninsula, in Russia (Chaplinski Yupik) (de Reuse 1994; Schwartz et al. 2019). The linguistic differences between these two varieties seem to be minor and not affect mutual intelligibility (Krauss 1975). The language has been undergoing a rapid generational shift, beginning in the 1950s in Russia and in the 1990s in Alaska (Schwartz et al. 2019). 

Akuzipik (Yupigestun/Yupik/St. Lawrence Island Yupik/Siberian Yupik/Chaplinski Yupik) is an endangered language belonging to the Yupik branch of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family. It is currently spoken by 800-900 people in the Bering Strait region, mainly on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska (St. Lawrence Island Yupik), and on the coast of the Chukotka Peninsula, in Russia (Chaplinski Yupik) (de Reuse 1994; Schwartz et al. 2019). The linguistic differences between these two varieties seem to be minor and not affect mutual intelligibility (Krauss 1975). The language has been undergoing a rapid generational shift, beginning in the 1950s in Russia and in the 1990s in Alaska (Schwartz et al. 2019). 

Quantum memories are of critical importance to the scalability of quantum information processing and quantum technologies in communication, measurement, and computation. Here we present numerical simulation of the storage of ultra-broadband photons in hot atomic barium vapor, which allows for quantum memory operation at telecom wavelengths. We numerically calculate the optimal control field profiles for the storage process both through direct Nedler-Mead simplex search and by singular value decomposition of the storage kernel, where the latter guarantees optimality. We provide a physical interpretation of our numerical results related in part to recent work on Autler-Townes-Splitting (ATS) based quantum memory, and show saturation of the protocol-independent bound on storage efficiency imposed by the optical depth for pulses of duration 200 fs to 17.5 ps. In conclusion we provide an outlook for implementing these results experimentally. 

St. Lawrence Island Yupik is an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. In this paper, we describe our work on Yupik jointly leveraging computational morphology and linguistic fieldwork, outlining the multilayer virtuous cycle that we continue to refine in our work to document and build tools for the language. After developing a preliminary morphological analyzer from an existing pedagogical grammar of Yupik, we used it to help analyze new word forms gathered through fieldwork. While in the eld, we augmented the analyzer to include in- sights into the lexicon, phonology, and morphology of the language as they were gained during elicitation sessions and subsequent data analysis. The analyzer and other tools we have developed are improved by a corpus that continues to grow through our digitization and documentation efforts, and the computational tools in turn allow us to improve and speed those same efforts. Through this process, we have successfully identified previously undescribed lexical, morphological, and phonological processes in Yupik while simultaneously increasing the coverage of the morphological analyzer. Given the polysynthetic nature of Yupik, a high-coverage morphological analyzer is a necessary prerequisite for the development of other high-level computational tools that have been requested by the Yupik community.