Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| author | Olewale, Bri Merx, Raphael Vylomova, Ekaterina |
| author_facet | Olewale, Bri Merx, Raphael Vylomova, Ekaterina |
| contents | We present Vavanagi, a community-run platform for Hula (Vula'a), an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea with approximately 10,000 speakers. Vavanagi supports crowdsourced English-Hula text translation and voice recording, with elder-led review and community-governed data infrastructure. To date, 77 translators and 4 reviewers have produced over 12k parallel sentence pairs covering 9k unique Hula words. We also propose a multi-level framework for measuring community involvement, from consultation to fully community-initiated and governed projects. We position Vavanagi at Level 5: initiative, design, implementation, and data governance all sit within the Hula community, making it, to our knowledge, the first community-led language technology initiative for a language of this size. Vavanagi shows how language technology can bridge village-based and urban members, connect generations, and support cultural heritage on the community's own terms. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14210 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea Olewale, Bri Merx, Raphael Vylomova, Ekaterina Computation and Language We present Vavanagi, a community-run platform for Hula (Vula'a), an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea with approximately 10,000 speakers. Vavanagi supports crowdsourced English-Hula text translation and voice recording, with elder-led review and community-governed data infrastructure. To date, 77 translators and 4 reviewers have produced over 12k parallel sentence pairs covering 9k unique Hula words. We also propose a multi-level framework for measuring community involvement, from consultation to fully community-initiated and governed projects. We position Vavanagi at Level 5: initiative, design, implementation, and data governance all sit within the Hula community, making it, to our knowledge, the first community-led language technology initiative for a language of this size. Vavanagi shows how language technology can bridge village-based and urban members, connect generations, and support cultural heritage on the community's own terms. |
| title | Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14210 |