Woods Cree (nîhithawîwin): A Grammatical Description and Computational Modelling

Abstract

In writing this thesis, I aim to accomplish three primary objectives, all of which are intended to increase the quality and quantity of language resources available in Woods Cree (nîhithawîwin, ISO:cwd). Firstly, I provide here a thorough descriptive overview of the Woods Cree phonological and morphological systems, describing in detail their mutual interactions and variations across geographic and cross-generational lines. Secondly, I describe the compilation of an online, bilingual Woods Cree-English corpus, containing tens of thousands of tokens from geographically, diachronically, and stylistically diverse sources, making use of this corpus throughout to evaluate various phenomena in the language. Thirdly, I describe the synthesis of my metalinguistic findings into a computational model of Woods Cree morphology, capable of both recognising and generating inflected wordforms in the language. In turn, this model was used to create a morphologically intelligent online dictionary of Woods Cree (https://itwiwina.altlab.dev/), adapted from existing computational tools created for the related dialect of Plains Cree.