Applying Linguistic Expertise to LLMs for Educational Material Development in Indigenous Languages

Justin Vasselli, Arturo MP, Taro Watanabe

Abstract: This paper presents our approach to the AmericasNLP 2024 Shared Task 2 as the JAJ (/dæz/) team. The task aimed at creating educational materials for indigenous languages, and we focused on Maya and Bribri. Given the unique linguistic features and challenges of these languages, and the limited size of the training datasets, we developed a hybrid methodology combining rule-based NLP methods with prompt-based techniques. This approach leverages the meta-linguistic capabilities of large language models, enabling us to blend broad, language-agnostic processing with customized solutions. Our approach lays a foundational framework that can be expanded to other indigenous languages in future work.