Language Technology at UiT

The Divvun and Giellatekno teams build language technology aimed at minority and indigenous languages

View GiellaLT on GitHub divvungiellatekno/giellalt.uit.no

Meeting setup

Agenda

Cf. one of the following, depending on context:

Opening, agenda review, participants

Opened at 10:24.

Present: Børre, Jovsset, Per-Eric, Sjur, Thomas, Tomi, Trond

Absent: none

Agenda accepted as is.

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Jovsset

Lene

Maaren

Per-Eric

Saara

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Pedagogical software online

Same as last week: working on it. Saara has a demo UI ready for vocabulary games, but not online yet. Lene has worked a lot on the word lists.

We are considering a speller tied to the ped tools, with the lexicon consisting of a predefined set of target words (say, a list ov beverages if asked for what to drink, etc.), and a speller mechanism related to that list. The speller mechanism here could actually be hunspell, as the infrastructure will soon be in place, just include all and only the wanted words.

TODO:

Documentation

TODO:

Corpus gathering

Jovsset has sent texts found at sametinget to Børre, mostly his own texts. Still to be added to the corpus repository.

Nothing new regarding smj texts.

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

See a separate document in plan/strat/5year.jspwiki.

Infrastructure

Lene has worked on the CG test bench, including adding regression testing.

To accomodate future enhancements in different directions (in rough order of importance):

  1. test bench for all parts of our language technology efforts
  2. migrate to svn
  3. merge gt, kt and st into one, probably after the svn move
  4. more modularised make / build infra (prepare for smn, sms, sjd, others)
  5. close certain parts of the code repository (requires svn)
  6. set up the Leopard Server features for collaborative support:
    1. permanent chat rooms
    2. stored (and indexed) chat transcripts of the chat rooms
    3. iCal server / group calendars
    4. wiki
  7. wiki? (is part of Leopard Server) or other web-based documentation
  8. improve Forrest stability and i18n support
  9. reorganise the documentation content:
    1. differ between target groups
    2. get better grouping
    3. decide what to write in forrest and what in wiki (cf. Apertium for a similar split)
    4. update/add missing parts
  10. migrate lexicons to XML, splitting the task
    1. Name lexica (the Name project)
    2. Dictionaries (already in XML, task is to integrate them)
    3. Open POSes (Komi as a test case)
  11. change the look of the documentation web
  12. sfst? Both as replacement for xfst and for hunspell/open-source proofing tools
  13. investigate the NSIS installer, potentially replacing the InstallShield package from Polderland
  14. corpus content moved to Max Planck repositories?

TODO:

Linguistics

North Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

Lule Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

TODO:

South Sámi

Nothing new since last week.

Name lexicon/risten.no infrastructure

Much work last week on the SD-terms collection, and the editing code relating to it. All old legacy code was cleaned and moved into the proper place, and deletion of entries was added.

Next up: to finish the work on the SD-terms collection (editing), then look at the name lexicon, and also dictionary search interface.

TODO:

  1. fix i18n bug in risten.no/G5 (so they will work without the proper locale request) (Sjur)
  2. fix bugs in lexc2xml; add comments to the log element (Saara)
  3. finish first version of the editing (Sjur)
  4. test editing of the xml files. If ok, then: (Sjur, Thomas, Trond)
  5. make terms-smX.xml <=== automatically from propernoun-sme-lex.xml (add nob as well) (the morphological section should be kept intact, in e.g. propernoun-sme-morph.txt) (Sjur, Saara)
  6. convert propernoun-($lang)-lex.txt to a derived file from common xml files (Sjur, Tomi, Saara)
  7. implement data synchronisation between risten.no and the cvs repo, and possibly other servers (ie the G5 as an alternative server to the public risten.no - it might be faster and better suited than the official one; also local installations could be treated the same way)
  8. start to use the xml file as source file
  9. clean terms-sme.xml such that all names have the correct tag for their use (e.g. @type=secondary) (Thomas, Maaren, linguists)
  10. merge placenames which are errouneously in different entries: e.g. Helsinki, Helsingfors, Helsset (linguists)
  11. publish the name lexicon on risten.no (Sjur)
  12. add missing parallel names for placenames (linguists)
  13. add informative links between first names like Niillas and Nils (linguists)

Dictionaries

MacOS X electronic dictionaries for smenob and smesmj. They work with Dictionary.app, and by point-and-keypress.

Install in:

~/Library/Dictionaries/

TODO:

Proofing tools

Hunspell

Strategy for creating .dic and .aff files: Because any wordform can only be split into at most three parts (because hunspell has maximally “double suffix stripping” (ie one suffix + one suffix)), we decided to put wordstems into the dic file, and then put the rest of the wordform into the aff file.

We will make one suffix lexicon for each lexc lexicon

’+’ implies continuation lexicon, ‘*’ implies lack of continuation lexicon.

Wordstems // dersuffix // infl // pos&clitic
100000    //  100       //  100  // 10
100000    +  (100       *   100 ) +   10   = 110 010 = divide late
100000    +   100       +  (100   *   10 ) = 101 100 = divide early

TODO:

  1. test latest lexicon (Sjur)
  2. add smj to the soup, make sure it works roughly as good as sme (Børre, Thomas, Per-Eric)
    1. added to derivations, needs to be tested
  3. fix the remaining conversion bugs for sme (Børre, Tomi)
  4. return to smj, and fix whatever is left to fix (Børre, Tomi)
  5. release a public beta at the end of April (Børre, Sjur)

Testing

Spelling Error Markup

TODO:

Speller bugs

List of bugs returned from Polderland: 621, 630, 652, 656, 676.

Open issues based on test results :

sme

Version: Davvisámi, version 1.0.1, 2008-04-01

smj

Version: Julevsáme, version 1.0.1, 2008-04-01

TODO:

Hyphenator bugs

Open issues based on test results :

sme

Lexicon version: Davvisámi, version 1.0.1, 2008-04-01

smj

Lexicon version: Julevsáme, version 1.0.1, 2008-04-01

InDesign tools

We’re waiting for an update from Polderland.

Releases

TODO:

Other

Corpus contracts + open source

Now decided to wait until we have changed from cvs to svn.

TODO:

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 13.5.2008, 12.00 Norwegian time.

Jovsset is away next week.

Summer vacations for next meeting.

The meeting was closed at 12:07.

Appendix - task lists for the next five days

Boerre

Jovsset

Lene

Maaren

Per-Eric

Saara

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond