The Kalaallisut‐English Dictionary Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, iso‐639‐3 kal) is an Inuit language spoken in Greenland and is the official language of the country. In this presentation we discuss a collaborative project initiated by the Greenland Language Secretariat (Oqaasileriffik) to create a bilingual Kalaallisut‐English dictionary, aimed at two groups of users, Kalaallisut speakers who are learning English and English speakers learning Kalaallisut. We discuss the content and format of the dictionary, the underlying principles upon which it is being created, and the collaborative process itself. This collaborative project involves researchers from Greenland and the US. The dictionary, intended to include something in the order of 25,000‐35,000 entries, aims to provide the necessary information for both sets of users to both comprehend and produce both languages. The two languages are typologically distinct and there is limited correspondence between what counts as a word in each language. Kalaallisut is highly polysynthetic with very productive derivational and inflectional morphology, providing challenges for what constitutes a lexical entry versus which forms are one‐off creations by speakers. Language learners need information not only about word meaning, but also about “word” creation. By the same token, much of the grammatical information included in English words is encoded in Kalaallisut suffixes, providing challenges for Kalaallisut speakers learning English. The team began its work by establishing a core set of principles including: 1. The dictionary is based on the modern standard language, as currently spoken, with all entries approved by the Greenland Language Council (Oqaasiliortut). 2. The dictionary is usage‐driven. 3. The dictionary does not replace a reference grammar but provides an internal word grammar, i.e., it includes necessary and sufficient information for a user to generate correct word forms in both languages. 4. Irregular, unpredictable or otherwise not transparent forms need to be included. 5. The dictionary should include all necessary information for proper usage such as collocations, style and register information These principles are illustrated with sample entries from both languages. Entries are created through a collaborative process, but final approval of all material rests with Oqaasiliortut, the Language Council, which is part of the Greenland Self‐ Government. This particular project illustrates not only the importance of the concrete linguistic entries, but also the significance of the collaborative process of dictionary making, and the approval process, which is controlled by the local government.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".