Parsing a Polysynthetic Language

We present the results of a project of building a lexical-functional grammar of Aymara, an Amerindian language. There was almost no research on Aymara in computational linguistics to date. The goal of the project is two-fold: First, we want to provide a formal description of the language. Second, NLP resources (lexicon and grammar) are being developed that could be used in machine translation and other NLP tasks. The paper presents formal description of selected properties of Aymara which are uncommon in wellresearched Western languages. Furthermore, we present an experimental machine translation system into Spanish and English.