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Abstract: In this paper, we provide a preliminary OT analysis of consonant deletion patterns and apparent OCP-driven intermorphemic phonological changes in St. Lawrence Island/Central Siberian Yupik (Inuit-Yupik-Unangam Tunuu; ISO 639-3: ess; here ‘Yupik’), an endangered polysynthetic language of the Bering Strait region. We propose a ranking of four constraints that, among others not discussed here, determine Yupik surface forms: MAX, DEP, *COMPLEX, and a prohibition on fricatives in adjacency known as OCPf (Lin 1997). We then describe the results of a pilot study in which native speakers were asked to produce complex forms from a root and a derivational morpheme. Further work will investigate these patterns in more detail and attempt to explain recalcitrant data such as instances of epenthesis in place of consonant (specifically, fricative) deletion. 

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. 

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). 

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. 

In this paper, we introduce a morphologically-aware electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. Implemented using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, the dictionary is set in an uncluttered interface and permits users to search in Yupik or in English for Yupik root words and Yupik derivational suffixes. For each matching result, our electronic dictionary presents the user with the corresponding entry from the Badten et al. (2008) Yupik-English paper dictionary. Because Yupik is a polysynthetic language, handling of multi- morphemic word forms is critical. If a user searches for an inflected Yupik word form, we perform a morphological analysis and return entries for the root word and for any derivational suffixes present in the word. This electronic dictionary should serve not only as a valuable resource for all students and speakers of Yupik, but also for field linguists working towards documentation and conservation of the language. 

Morphological analysis is a critical enabling technology for polysynthetic languages. We present a neural morphological analyzer for case-inflected nouns in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered polysynthetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family, treating morphological analysis as a recurrent neural sequence-to-sequence task. By utilizing an existing finite-state morphological analyzer to create training data, we improve analysis coverage on attested Yupik word types from approximately 75% for the existing finite-state analyzer to 100% for the neural analyzer. At the same time, we achieve a substantially higher level of accuracy on a held-out testing set, from 78.9% accuracy for the finite-state analyzer to 92.2% accuracy for our neural analyzer. 

In this paper, we introduce a morphologically-aware electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. Implemented using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, the dictionary is set in an uncluttered interface and permits users to search in Yupik or in English for Yupik root words and Yupik derivational suffixes. For each matching result, our electronic dictionary presents the user with the corresponding entry from the Badten (2008) Yupik-English paper dictionary. Because Yupik is a polysynthetic language, handling of multimorphemic word forms is critical. If a user searches for an inflected Yupik word form, we perform a morphological analysis and return entries for the root word and for any derivational suffixes present in the word. This electronic dictionary should serve not only as a valuable resource for all students and speakers of Yupik, but also for field linguists working towards documentation and conservation of the language.