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Main Authors: van Dam, Kellen Parker, Stephen, Abishek
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21584
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author van Dam, Kellen Parker
Stephen, Abishek
author_facet van Dam, Kellen Parker
Stephen, Abishek
contents Lexical data collection in language documentation often contains transcription errors and undocumented borrowings that can mislead linguistic analysis. We present unsupervised anomaly detection methods to identify phonotactic inconsistencies in wordlists, applying them to a multilingual dataset of Kokborok varieties with Bangla. Using character-level and syllable-level phonotactic features, our algorithms identify potential transcription errors and borrowings. While precision and recall remain modest due to the subtle nature of these anomalies, syllable-aware features significantly outperform character-level baselines. The high-recall approach provides fieldworkers with a systematic method to flag entries requiring verification, supporting data quality improvement in low-resourced language documentation.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Quality Control for Language Documentation: Detecting Phonotactic Inconsistencies in a Kokborok Wordlist
van Dam, Kellen Parker
Stephen, Abishek
Computation and Language
Lexical data collection in language documentation often contains transcription errors and undocumented borrowings that can mislead linguistic analysis. We present unsupervised anomaly detection methods to identify phonotactic inconsistencies in wordlists, applying them to a multilingual dataset of Kokborok varieties with Bangla. Using character-level and syllable-level phonotactic features, our algorithms identify potential transcription errors and borrowings. While precision and recall remain modest due to the subtle nature of these anomalies, syllable-aware features significantly outperform character-level baselines. The high-recall approach provides fieldworkers with a systematic method to flag entries requiring verification, supporting data quality improvement in low-resourced language documentation.
title Automated Quality Control for Language Documentation: Detecting Phonotactic Inconsistencies in a Kokborok Wordlist
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21584