10.17608/k6.auckland.9869459.v1
Kristin Stock
Kristin
Stock
Hone Morris
Hone
Morris
Margaret Forster
Margaret
Forster
Rex Paraku
Rex
Paraku
Ekaterina Egorova
Ekaterina
Egorova
He Tatai Whenua: Automated Extraction of Landscape Terms and their Meanings in New Zealand Maori
The University of Auckland
2019
corpus linguistics
indigenous language
New Zealand Maori
landscape
Geospatial Information Systems
2019-09-18 00:50:48
Conference contribution
https://auckland.figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/He_Tatai_Whenua_Automated_Extraction_of_Landscape_Terms_and_their_Meanings_in_New_Zealand_Maori/9869459
<div>Current geographic information systems largely represent Western conceptualisations of landscape, and indigenous worldviews are rarely incorporated, resulting in decision making that does not consider all perspectives. The incorporation of New Zealand Maori worldviews in such systems requires a better understanding of the ways that Maori think about land. We use corpus linguistics to address this problem, demonstrating the automated extraction and analysis of content from early newspaper editions in the Maori language using word co-occurrences, which we then explore using an analytical frame developed for New Zealand Maori. We also demonstrate a method for automatically classifying geographic senses of landscape terms in the Maori using machine learning with a bag of words approach with SVM, a particular challenge due to the high degree of polysemy in the language.</div>