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 10:12.

Present: Børre, Ciprian, David, Jovsset, Sjur, Thomas, Tomi

Absent: Trond

Agenda accepted.

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Ciprian

David

Jovsset

Per-Eric

Saara

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Pedagogical software online

Meeting memos can be found at [http://giellatekno.uit.no/ped/index.html#Meeting+memos]

Corpus gathering

The problem with the present setup is that the corpus administrators are not informed about changes in the corpus repository, as well as a lack of a proper change history - we don’t know who did what when. This has lead to a number of unidentifiable files, or files without known history or origin.

Discussion to be held in the news group. Update: the news server were partially broken, but that is fixed now.

We’ll scan and OCR some of the sma texts we have received a license for.

David has talked to DAUM (Marica Blind), who said they can’t give out any texts. Thomas, who has worked there, will talk to the boss Ola Wennstedt, to discuss the issue further.

David has also contacted the children of Ella Holm Bull, and has received permission to use her books. But they need to be scanned and OCR’ed, as none are available in digital form.

Jovsset has been discussing access to the list of verb baseforms from Verbh with one of the authors, but the issue is still open. Also discussed the translated text (see below).

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

David has been interviewed by Länstidningen, which last Saturday published the article. The web version is available [here | http://www.ltz.se/artikel_standard.php?id=558132&avdelning_1=101&avdelning_2=136].

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Infrastructure

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

  1. test bench for all parts of our language technology efforts
    1. test bench enhanced, but not yet complet
  2. 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
  3. wiki? on G5 (is part of Leopard Server) or other web-based documentation
  4. improve Forrest stability and i18n support ( the divvun crashes)
    1. Sjur has been working on better i18n and pdf rendering
    2. Børre has some ideas for getting back to serving static html files
  5. reorganise the documentation:
    1. differ between target groups
    2. get better grouping
    3. decide what to write in forrest and what in wiki (cf. Apertium and [http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/apertium/]) for a similar split)
    4. update/add missing parts
  6. migrate lexc lexicons to XML, splitting the task
    1. Name lexica (the Name project)
    2. Dictionaries (already in XML, task is to integrate them)
    3. At least migrate the lexc open POSes (Komi as a pilot case)
  7. change the look of the documentation web
  8. sfst?
    1. replacement for xfst -> see [omorf | http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/kieliteknologia/tutkimus/omor/index.shtml], omorf wiki and omorfi
    2. replacement for hunspell/open-source proofing tools
  9. investigate the NSIS installer, potentially replacing the InstallShield package from Polderland
  10. corpus content moved to Max Planck repositories? Norsk språkbank?
  11. update infrastructure to allow content-restricted spellers for special target groups

SVN issues:

TODO:

Linguistics

North Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

http://giellatekno.uit.no/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=711

Lule Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

TODO:

South Sámi

Trond has added a number of files to words/dicts/smanob/, which he would like processed manually. The sma linguists can spend some of their time this week to help out Trond.

TODO:

Name lexicon/risten.no infrastructure

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, 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

Ciprian is working hard on it.

TODO:

Proofing tools

Hunspell

Starting point:

makealias gives us:

Our conversion now gives:

but several word forms are not recognised.

TODO:

OpenXSpell

Working everywhere (almost) in MacOS X applications, provides Sámi spell checking system-wide through a hunspell back-end. OpenXSPell

The crashing bug does not seem to be related to UTF-8 (or non-ASCII chars). The bug is reported to the author (or to Sourceforge, that is).

Testing

Spelling Error Markup

TODO:

Speller testing

TODO:

Speller updates

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, 2008-10-22

smj

Version: Julevsáme, version 1.0.1, 2008-10-16

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

TODO:

InDesign tools

Nothing new.

Releases

TODO:

Other

Sámi week in Tromsø

Sigbjørn Skåden has asked the UiT gang to demonstrate etc at the Tromsø city Library as a part of that week and the happenings at the Library.

Sounds like a good idea, we will be there.

Gathering

Best week for Thomas is week 47, but week 45 is ok during regular working hours. Week 47 might be even better, at least for some of us.

Main topics:

The Thursday will be focused on dictionaries and term collections, in a meeting with the terminology and IT teams at SD.

Forthcoming Sámi allaskuvla conference

Info on the conference site.

Title submitted is: Goallosteapmi ja suorggideapmi Divvun-reaidduin

TODO:

Text to speech

Update: We have received some first samples, and they sound quite good:)

We are planning a North Sámi text to speech. Work on the text-to-transcription (ttt) component has begun, and for the transcription-to-sound we cooperate with U Hki.

From Trond’s report:

TODO:

Corpus contracts + open source

Postponed until the svn repository is fully functional (it is too open now).

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 10.11.2008, 9.30 Norwegian time.

Tomi will be away on Thursday and Friday this week.

The meeting was closed at 12:03.

Appendix - task lists for the next five days

Boerre

Ciprian

David

Jovsset

Per-Eric

Saara

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond