Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku

Kunwinjku is a polysynthetic language spoken in northern Australia. Members of the community have expressed interest in co-developing language applications which could assist in the production of written language resources for education and language learning. Modelling Kunwinjku morphology is a step towards accomplishing these goals. We discuss some of the modeling challenges presented by Kunwinjku verbal morphology, and in polysynthetic languages more generally. We show that a model using standard features of the Foma toolkit can account for much of the verb structure. Our contributions include the first morphological analyzer for Kunwinjku, and a discussion of polysynthetic language features and how they affect modelling decisions. Continuing challenges include robustness in the face of variation and unseen vocabulary, as well as how to handle complex reduplicative processes.