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Glossed Data in Northern Interior Salish

Summary

Northern Interior Salish is a group of three endangered languages of the Pacific Northwest: St'át'imcets, nɬeʔkepmxcín and Secwepemctsín. Each now has only a small community of first-language speakers, and before this work none of them had a compiled dataset suitable for NLP. Stacey builds the first such resources as interlinear glossed text. Every sentence has four lines: a native transcription, a morpheme segmentation, morpheme-level gloss labels and an English translation.

The source material differs by language. St'át'imcets comes from a published story collection, nɬeʔkepmxcín from examples gathered across several conference papers, and Secwepemctsín from an unpublished gloss of a single narrative. Glossed text is only loosely structured, so the author defines a formatting standard extending the Leipzig Glossing Rules and cleans all the data to match it. Edits went mostly to the analytical lines, leaving speakers' transcriptions largely intact. Scripts that partly automate this preparation are released. The paper also centres community consent and documents how permissions were obtained. This matters for anyone building language technology to support revitalization.

Key points

  • Languages: St'át'imcets (lil), nɬeʔkepmxcín (thp) and Secwepemctsín (shs). Each has fewer than 160 L1 speakers (Gessner, Herbert & Parker, 2022).
  • Sources:
    • St'át'imcets: Alexander (2016), 18 stories from one speaker, in the van Eijk orthography.
    • nɬeʔkepmxcín: glossed sentences from 7 ICSNL 2023 papers, covering three speakers, in a NAPA variant. A published book could not be digitized for lack of permission.
    • Secwepemctsín: Oliver (2024), a gloss of one narrative from Kuipers (1974), in the Kuipers orthography.
  • Format standard: nine rules. Examples include matching word counts across lines, matching morpheme counts and boundary symbols between segmentation and gloss, square brackets for unrealized underlying morphemes, and asterisks marking out-of-language tokens. Curly brackets for reduplicating infixes were introduced during cleaning.
  • Permissions: St'át'imcets was approved by the Upper St'át'imc Language Authority (USLA), and nɬeʔkepmxcín by the speakers directly. For Secwepemctsín neither route was possible: no language authority is known and the speaker has died.
  • Dataset sizes: sentence and word counts per language are in Table 1, but the numbers did not survive the PDF extraction. Current usage terms are kept in the project repository.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2isngefy6ags

@inproceedings{stacey2026glossed,
  title = {{Glossed Data in Northern Interior Salish}},
  author = {Stacey, Anna},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2isngefy6ags},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2isngefy6ags}
}

References

20 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Alexander, C. (2016). Sqwéqwel’ múta7 sptakwlh: St̓át̓imcets Narratives by Qwa7yán’ak (Carl Alexander). Recorded, transcribed, translated and edited by Elliott Callahan, Henry Davis, John Lyon & Lisa Matthewson. Vancouver and Lillooet, Canada: University of British Columbia Occasional Papers in Ling… find
  2. Alexander, C. (2025). Sqwéqwel’ múta7 sptakwlh: St̓át̓imcets Narratives by Qwa7yán’ak (Carl Alexander) Volume II. Transcribed, translated and edited by Matt Andrew, Henry Davis & John Lyon. Vancouver and Lillooet, Canada: Pacific Northwest Languages and Literatures Press (PNWLL) and the Upper St’át’… find
  3. Bickel, B. & Zúñiga, F. (2017). The ‘Word’ in Polysynthetic Languages: Phonological and Syntactic Challenges. The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis,. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 158-185. find
  4. Comrie, B., Haspelmath, M. & Bickel, B. (2008). The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses. Max Planck Institute for Evolutional Anthropology. find
  5. Davis, H. (2019). Salish Languages. The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages. find
  6. Edwards, A., Edwards F., Hickson & Tom. In preparation. find
  7. Edwards, B., LaRochelle, M., & Mitchell, S. (2017). Sqwéqwel’s Nelh Skelkekla7lhkálha (Tales of Our Elders). Recorded, transcribed, translated and edited by Davis H., Lyon J., van Eijk, J., & Whitley, R. Vancouver and Lillooet, Canada: University of British Columbia Occasional Papers in Linguistics… find
  8. Egesdal, S. M., Thompson, T. M., & Jimmie, M. N. (2011). nłeʔképmxcín: Thompson River Salish Speech. Bellingham, Washington: Whatcom Museum Publications. find
  9. Gessner, S., Herbert, T., & Parker, A. (2022). Report on the Status of B.C. First Nations Languages. Online (https://fpcc.ca/resource/language-status-report-2022/): First Peoples’ Cultural Council. find
  10. Givens, K. (2023). Degree Comparison in Nɬeʔkepmxcín. In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbi… find
  11. Givens, K., & Hall, B. (2023). The Moon and the Birchbark Canoe (ɬ máʕxetn pe ɬ qwɬinéwɬ). In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver,… find
  12. Hall, B. (2023). A Brief Look at Infinitives in Nɬeʔkepmxcín. In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver, Canada: University of British… find
  13. Hannon, E., & Smith, C. (2023). A Brief Comparison of Two Nɬeʔkepmxcín Evidentials. In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver, Canada:… find
  14. Hannon, E., Stacey, A., & Steiner, R. (2023). Glossed Conversational Data in Nɬeʔkepmxcín. In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver,… find
  15. Kuipers, A. H. (1974). The Shuswap Language. The Hague, The Netherlands. find
  16. Matthewson, L. (2005). When I Was Small – I Wan Kwikws. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press. find
  17. Matthewson, L. (2023). Two Types of Polar Question in Nɬeʔkepmxcín. In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver, Canada: University of B… find
  18. Mitchell, S. (2022). Wa7 Sqwéqwel’ sSam: St’át’imcets Stories from Sam Mitchell. Volume I of The Bouchard Tapes, recorded by Bouchard, R., transcribed, translated and edited by Lyon, J., & Davis, H., with an introduction by Davis, H. Vancouver and Lillooet, Canada: Pacific Northwest Languages and Li… find
  19. Oliver, B. (2024). Gloss of The Gambler’s Son and Red-Cap by Seymour Petel. Unpublished. find
  20. Reid, D. (2023). An Acoustic Analysis of Aspiration in Nɬeʔkepmxcín. In Reisinger, D. K. E., Griffin, L., Mellesmoen, G., Nederveen, S., Schillo, J., & Trotter, B. (eds.), Proceedings of the 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). Vancouver, Canada: University of… find

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