Improved Finite-State Morphological Analysis for St. Lawrence Island Yupik Using Paradigm Function Morphology

St. Lawrence Island Yupik is an endangered polysynthetic language of the Bering Strait region. While conducting linguistic fieldwork between 2016 and 2019, we observed substantial support within the Yupik community for language revitalization and for resource development to support Yupik education. To that end, Chen {\&} Schwartz (2018) implemented a finite-state morphological analyzer as a critical enabling technology for use in Yupik language education and technology. Chen {\&} Schwartz (2018) reported a morphological analysis coverage rate of approximately 75{\%} on a dataset of 60K Yupik tokens, leaving considerable room for improvement. In this work, we present a re-implementation of the Chen {\&} Schwartz (2018) finite-state morphological analyzer for St. Lawrence Island Yupik that incorporates new linguistic insights; in particular, in this implementation we make use of the Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) theory of morphology. We evaluate this new PFM-based morphological analyzer, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms the existing analyzer of Chen {\&} Schwartz (2018) with respect to accuracy and coverage rate across multiple datasets.