{"slug": "nushurescue-reviving-the-endangered-nushu-language-with-ai", "title": "NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI", "summary": "Researchers Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, and Soroush Vosoughi presented NüshuRescue, an AI-driven framework for training large language models on endangered languages with minimal data, at COLING 2025 in Abu Dhabi. Using GPT-4-Turbo with no prior exposure to Nüshu and only 35 short examples from NCGold, a new 500-sentence Nüshu-Chinese parallel corpus, NüshuRescue reached 48.69% translation accuracy on 50 withheld sentences and generated NCSilver, 98 newly translated modern Chinese sentences. The team also built FastText-based and Seq2Seq models and released all datasets and code publicly on GitHub.", "body_md": "##### Abstract\n\nThe 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\n[https://github.com/ivoryayang/NushuRescue](https://github.com/ivoryayang/NushuRescue).\n\n- Anthology ID:\n- 2025.coling-main.468\n- Volume:\n- [Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics](/volumes/2025.coling-main/)\n- Month:\n- January\n- Year:\n- 2025\n- Address:\n- Abu Dhabi, UAE\n- Editors:\n- [Owen Rambow](/people/owen-rambow/) ,[Leo Wanner](/people/leo-wanner/) ,[Marianna Apidianaki](/people/marianna-apidianaki/) ,[Hend Al-Khalifa](/people/hend-al-khalifa/) ,[Barbara Di Eugenio](/people/barbara-di-eugenio/) ,[Steven Schockaert](/people/steven-schockaert/)\n- Venue:\n- [COLING](/venues/coling/)\n- SIG:\n- Publisher:\n- Association for Computational Linguistics\n- Note:\n- Pages:\n- 7020–7034\n- Language:\n- URL:\n- [https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/)\n- DOI:\n- Cite (ACL):\n- Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, and Soroush Vosoughi. 2025. [NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/) . In*Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics* , pages 7020–7034, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.\n- Cite (Informal):\n- [NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/) (Yang et al., COLING 2025)\n- PDF:\n- [https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468.pdf)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nushurescue-reviving-the-endangered-nushu-language-with-ai", "canonical_source": "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/", "published_at": "2026-09-12 12:51:25+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-12 13:11:27.316626+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["natural-language-processing", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["NüshuRescue", "Nüshu", "NCGold", "NCSilver", "GPT-4-Turbo", "Ivory Yang", "Weicheng Ma", "Soroush Vosoughi"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nushurescue-reviving-the-endangered-nushu-language-with-ai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nushurescue-reviving-the-endangered-nushu-language-with-ai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nushurescue-reviving-the-endangered-nushu-language-with-ai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nushurescue-reviving-the-endangered-nushu-language-with-ai.jsonld"}}