rich-regular-morphology

Contemplations and resolutions for rule-based morphological descriptions of languages with rich and regular morphology with examples from Uralic, Salish and Maipurean languages

Documentation

• Rueter_Hoimupaevad-2019-10-11_Tallinn.pdf These are the slides from a presentation in Tallinn 2019-10-11 Morphological analyzers and other digital tools for Uralic languages

Background

Searching for a methodology for linguistics

• (1) Extract paradigms from grammars, readers and research to build an analyzer.
• (2) Extract words, part-of-speech information and definitions from existing dictionaries and research. Build on what has already been done (Dutch, French, German, Russian,…)
• (3) Test analysis coverage on written texts. Are the forms unrecognized proper words?
• (4) Disambiguate morphological analyses based on grammars and research. Point out gaps in descriptions
• (5) Test syntactic disambiguation on example sentences cited in grammatical descriptions of the language. And then retest on text corpora.
• (6) Make disambiguated sentences public, so others can test. One by-product of these golden standards are treebanks.
• (7) Use all phases to benefit the speaker and research community

Open-source morphological descriptions for Uralic languages

• First transducers of minority Uralic languages after Finnish 1983 (Kimmo Koskenniemi)

• Meadow Mari ~1986 (Jorma Luutonen)

• Komi-Zyrian 1996 (Jack Rueter)

• Giellatekno ~2000 begins work with Sami descriptions (Trond Trosterud et al) Barents Sea languages, Circum Polar languages ~2004-> other Uralic languages

Minority Uralic language forms with finite-state morphology development

• Balto-Finnic: fit = Meänkieli, fkv = Kveen, izh = Ingrian, krl = Karelian, liv = Livonian, olo = Olonets-Karelian aka Livvi, vep = Veps, vot = Votic, vro = Võro
• Sami: sjd = Kildin Sami, sje = Pite Sami, sma = South Sami, sme = Northern Sami, smj = Lule Sami, smn = Inari Sami, sms = Skolt Sami
• Mordvin: mdf = Moksha, myv = Erzya
• Mari: mhr = Meadow & Eastern Mari, mrj = Hill Mari aka Western Mari
• Permic: koi = Komi-Permyak, kpv = Komi-Zyrian, udm = Udmurt
• Ob Ugrian: kca = Khanty, mns = Mansi
• Samoyedic: nio = Nganasan , sel = Selkup, yrk = Nenets

Pertinent majority languages with finite-state morphology development

• Uralic languages in majority: est = Estonian, fin = Finnish, hun = Hungarian
• Auxilliary languages: deu = German, lav = Latvian, nob = Norwegian Bokmål, rus = Russian, tat = Tatar

Setting up a Morphological analyzer

• Find a source and use the known morphological information
• Find or build a lexicon to propogate this word type

...

Tools

• Keyboards Giellalt/
• Spell checkers: Hunspell, Voikko
• Click-in-text dictionaries
• Language learning
• Text-to-speech
• Translation

Giella Dictionaries

Click-in-text dictionaries, Giella:

• North Sami
• Sourthern Sami
• Inari Sami
• Skolt Sami
• Northern Balto-Finnic languages
• Southern Balto-Finnic languages
• Erzya and Moksha
• Hill and Meadow Mari
• Komi-Zyrian and Udmurt
• Tundra Nenets and Mansi

Language internal and external links in multilingual dictionaries, Akusanat:

• https://www.akusanat.com/,
• https://www.akusanat.com/verdd
• https://www.akusanat.com/semantics

Material Collaborations: FU-Lab, University of Turku, University of Tartu, University, EKI, University of Vienna, Livones, Võro Instituut

Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning

• ICALL at Giella (Giellatekno & Divvun)
• Northern Sami Flag ship
• Skolt Sami
• Erzya
• Võro

Translation

• Apertium: Shallow-transfer for closely related languages

Text-to-speech

• Common Voice (Mozilla)

Infrastructures with intense activity

• EKI in Tallinn, Estonia
• FU-Lab in Syktyvkar, Komi Republic
• Giella in Tromsø, Norway
• Mari Research Institute for Language, Literature and History
• UL Livonian institute
• Võro Instituut