3. Statement of Research Questions or Hypothesis

Brief Introduction:

The resilience of creole languages is currently being tested with the advent of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic threatening the lives of older language-keepers. Therefore, the careful creation of tools and frameworks is needed to facilitate society’s creole language needs. However, there are challenges present in natural language processing, particularly when dealing with sentiment analysis, word-sense disambiguation, and issues with dependency parsers in cross-lingual settings.

Statement:

It has been suggested that categorizing the challenges and formalizing their interpretation using Universal Dependencies may help create a Saint Lucian Kwéyòl dependency treebank, and later facilitate other needed NLP tasks (such as sentiment analysis of texts).

Research question:

Can modern NLP tools effectively address fundamental deficiencies in low resource creole language data, such as Saint Lucian Kwéyòl?

Hypothesis:

Modern NLP tools can effectively address fundamental deficiencies in low resource creole language data, such as Saint Lucian Kwéyòl.

Null hypothesis:

Application of modern NLP tools will not provide a substantial/ have any effect on the state of the deficiencies in low resource creole languages.