Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

We present Vavanagi, a community-run platform for Hula (Vula'a), an Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea with approximately 10,000 speakers. Vavanagi supports crowdsourced English-Hula text translation and voice recording, with elder-led review and community-governed data infrastructure. To date, 77 translators and 4 reviewers have produced over 12k parallel sentence pairs covering 9k unique Hula words. We also propose a multi-level framework for measuring community involvement, from consultation to fully community-initiated and governed projects. We position Vavanagi at Level 5: initiative, design, implementation, and data governance all sit within the Hula community, making it, to our knowledge, the first community-led language technology initiative for a language of this size. Vavanagi shows how language technology can bridge village-based and urban members, connect generations, and support cultural heritage on the community's own terms.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Overview of the Vavanagi platform and Hula language
• Figure 2: Community involvement spectrum, from consultation to community governance. See mapping of prior work onto the spectrum in Table \ref{['tab:involvement-spectrum']}.
• Figure 3: Workflow on the Vavanagi platform, with one admin user, 77 translators, and 4 reviewers.
• Figure 4: Screenshots of the Vavanagi platform showing the home page, translator data-entry view, and reviewer interface.