Research on ethnic minority language text tools and corpora of China

The increasing interest in the use of large-scale textual resources for NLP research has led to the rapid proliferation of both massive amounts of textual data and text-handling tools. Most of them are dedicated to a widely-used language (such as English, French or Chinese). However, huge efforts are required to develop the corresponding resource for other ethnic minority languages. In this paper, we analyze the requirements of ethnic minority language corpus, discuss some surrounding issues on the development of corpus-handling tools for ethnic minority language, and present the initial results of above work.