Abstract
The preservation and revitalization of endangered and extinct languages is a meaningful endeavor, conserving cultural heritage while enriching fields like linguistics and anthropology. However, these languages are typically low-resource, making their reconstruction labor-intensive and costly. This challenge is exemplified by Nüshu, a rare script historically used by Yao women in China for self-expression within a patriarchal society. To address this challenge, we introduce NüshuRescue, an AI-driven framework designed to train large language models (LLMs) on endangered languages with minimal data. NüshuRescue automates evaluation and expands target corpora to accelerate linguistic revitalization. As a foundational component, we developed NCGold, a 500-sentence Nüshu-Chinese parallel corpus, the first publicly available dataset of its kind. Leveraging GPT-4-Turbo, with no prior exposure to Nüshu and only 35 short examples from NCGold, NüshuRescue achieved 48.69% translation accuracy on 50 withheld sentences and generated NCSilver, a set of 98 newly translated modern Chinese sentences of varying lengths. In addition, we developed FastText-based and Seq2Seq models to further support research on Nüshu. NüshuRescue provides a versatile and scalable tool for the revitalization of endangered languages, minimizing the need for extensive human input. All datasets and code have been made publicly available at
[https://github.com/ivoryayang/NushuRescue](https://github.com/ivoryayang/NushuRescue).
- Anthology ID:
- 2025.coling-main.468
- Volume:
- [Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics](/volumes/2025.coling-main/)
- Month:
- January
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Editors:
- Owen Rambow ,Leo Wanner ,Marianna Apidianaki ,Hend Al-Khalifa ,Barbara Di Eugenio ,Steven Schockaert
- Venue:
- [COLING](/venues/coling/)
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7020–7034
- Language:
- URL:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/)
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, and Soroush Vosoughi. 2025. NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI . InProceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics , pages 7020–7034, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- [NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/) (Yang et al., COLING 2025)
- PDF:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468.pdf)