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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14210 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14210/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [A Large-Scale Study of Machine Translation in the Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04593/) (2021)
- [Not always about you: Prioritizing community needs when developing endangered language technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05541/) (2022)
- ["It's how you do things that matters": Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02639/) (2024)
- [Low-resource Machine Translation: what for? who for? An observational study on a dedicated Tetun language translation service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12262/) (2024)
- [Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03186/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.