Corpora deduplication or duplication in Natural Language Processing of few resourced languages ? A case of study: The Mexico's Nahuatl

arXiv cs.CL / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper investigates whether controlled data duplication can help NLP for few-resourced “π-languages,” where large-scale training corpora are largely unavailable.
  • It presents a case study on Nawatl (Nahuatl), aiming to expand the small π-yalli corpus despite its agglutinative, polysynthetic structure and many dialectal varieties.
  • The authors apply an incremental duplication technique to create an expanded training set for learning sentence-level embeddings.
  • Experiments using static embeddings on a semantic similarity task show a moderate performance improvement versus using the original corpus alone.
  • The authors claim the specific duplication approach is not previously used in the literature, positioning the work as a potential new research direction for low-resource NLP.

Abstract

In this article, we seek to answer the following question: could data duplication be useful in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for languages with limited computational resources? In this type of languages (or \pi-languages), corpora available for training Large Language Models are virtually non-existent. In particular, we will study the impact of corpora expansion in Nawatl, an agglutinative and polysynthetic \pi-language spoken by over 2 million people, with a large number of dialectal varieties. The aim is to expand the new \pi-yalli corpus, which contains a limited number of Nawatl texts, by duplicating it in a controlled way. In our experiments, we will use the incremental duplication technique. The aim is to learn embeddings that are well-suited to NLP tasks. Thus, static embeddings were trained and evaluated in a sentence-level semantic similarity task. Our results show a moderate improvement in performance when using incremental duplication compared to the results obtained using only the corpus without expansion. Furthermore, to our knowledge, this technique has not yet been used in the literature.