Unfragmenting Nawatl NMT: Single-Variant Specialization for Masewalkopa
In minoritized (low-resource) language technologies, a common response to data sparsity is to aggregate text across multiple varieties and treat the combined data as a single corpus. However, mixed corpora of closely related indigenous variants can produce an artificial register that is accountable to no single speaker community, a structural failure we call variant fragmentation. This issue is acute for minoritized languages native to Mexico, such as Nawatl. Building on a 70,000-pair multi-variant foundation, we specialize an mT5-large checkpoint to Masewalkopa (nhn), the Nawatl variety spoken in Santa Ana Tlacotenco. We curate 2,665 parallel pairs, reserve all sentence-level data for ev...
| Authors | Luis A. Mercado-Campos, Alexis Palmer |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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