News on ELF-Lab

ELF-Lab @ LREC 2026 in Mallorca

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A number of current and former ELF-Lab members are presenting at the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) in Mallorca, Spain from May 13-15.

Current RA Matthias Diederichsen and Professor Christopher Hammerly are presenting their work entitled Two Ojibwe Constraint Grammars: Morphological Disambiguation and Dependency Parsing in a talk on May 15th. You can find the full proceedings paper here.

Former RA and UBC MA student Anna Stacey is presenting her work in a poster on May 13th entitled Glossed Data in Northern Interior Salish. You can find the full proceedings paper here.

Jurotich & Hammerly at HSP

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

PhD Student and graduate RA Marcella Jurotich (with co-author Chris Hammerly) is presenting her work entitled Impact of Information Structure on Comprehension of the Inverse Verb Form in Ojibwe in a poster at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing at MIT on March 26-28, 2026.

Diederichsen wins Best Oral Presentation Award at LSURC

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Undergraduate RA Matthias Diederichsen won the Best Oral Presentation Award for his talk at the Language Sciences Undergraduate Research Coference (LSURC) at UBC, which took place on February 27th and 28th, 2026. His talk was entitled Word Order in a “Free Word Order” Language: An Ojibwe Treebank Study and looked at how animacy impacts word order and argument realization in Ojibwe texts.

OjibweMorph paper appears in LRE

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A paper describing the Ojibwemorph FST is now out in Language Resources and Evaluation. Check it out for details on the model creation and evaluation, and see our GitHub repository for the latest updates!

Hammerly, C., Livesay, N., Arppe, A., Stacey, A., & Silfverberg, M. (2026). OjibweMorph: an approachable finite-state transducer for Ojibwe (and beyond). Language Resources and Evaluation, 60(2), 27.

New Paper from Chris Hammerly and Minh Nguyen

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

ELF Lab members Chris and Minh have published a proceedings paper at the conference AmericasNLP on Ojibwe machine translation.

Nguyen, M. Hammerly, C. Silfverberg, M. (2025) A hybrid approach to low-resource machine translation for Ojibwe verbs. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP 2025).

New Paper from from ELF members and collaborators

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

ELF Lab members and collaborators, Shenran Wang, Changbing Yang, Mike Parkhill, Chad Quinn, Jian Zhu, and Chris Hammerly published a paper in the NAACL proceedings.

Wang, S., Yang, C., Parkhill, M., Quinn, C., Hammerly, C., and Zhu, J. (2025) Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

New Paper from Viann Sum Yat Chan and Chris Hammerly

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

ELF Lab members, Viann and Chris published a paper in the proceedings of the ComputEL-8 Workshop in Honolulu on an Ojibwe text-to-speech Teacher Workshop

Chan, V. & Hammerly, C. (2025) Evaluating Indigenous language speech synthesis for education: A participatory design workshop on Ojibwe text-to-speech. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (ComputEL-8).

ELF lab @ LSURC 2025!

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of February, our Director Dr.Hammerly was invited as a plenary speaker to the Language Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference. This conference run by UBC undergraduates is a celebration of the exciting research done by undergraduates across Canada.

Dr. Hammerly was invited to speak on the various projects being developed at ELF Lab relating to technology’s role in language revitalization.

Additionally, our undergraduate RA, Hope Trischuk, gave an oral presentation on her work with ELF lab: Assessing Intuitions about Obviation in Learners of Anishinaabemowin. For her efforts, she was awarded first place in the Oral Presentation category!