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 10:13.

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

Absent: Maja, Trond

Agenda accepted as is.

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Ciprian

David

Jovsset

Per-Eric

Maja

Saara

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Pedagogical software online

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

TODO

Corpus gathering

David has talked more to Š bláđi, they seem positive about giving us a substantial amount of their texts.

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

We need more promotions of the Divvun tools. Making a movie demonstrating its use (screencast), and put it up on Youtube.

Next tour de Divvun probably in week 13. Per-Eric has talked to Sámij åhpadusguovdásj in Jokkmokk, they would also like to get a presentation.

Presentation in Trondheim:

Bring 50 CD’s and leaflets to Trondheim. Contract copies for people to take home.

60 more CDs 20 long contracts 70 short contracts

no leaflet.

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

Collective congratulations!

The money will be in the next state budget, meaning potentially a project start January 1, 2010. We need to prepare for such a project start, even though we don’t know that we will get the money.

TODO:

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. use HFST as alternative to XFST
  9. corpus content moved to Max Planck repositories? Norsk språkbank?
  10. update infrastructure to allow content-restricted spellers for special target groups

SVN issues:

SVN strategies:

TODO:

Linguistics

We need a more fine-grained system for denoting morphological boundaries. Here’s what Sjur suggests:

1. word boundary: ## (# makes .#. unusable in twolc)
1. inflection: <, >
1. compound-like inflection: <#, #> (cf *-gujmie*) (lexc %<#, #%>)
1. derivation: «, »
1. compound-like derivation: «#, #» (cf *-aktig, -skap* in nob, swe, etc)
1. clitica: ‹, › - *muorak* and *muorage* but only *muorasge* and not
 *muorask*
1. opaque compounds (*bringebær*): *#, #* - * on the side of the opaque part

The multichar sequences should be defined as Multichar_Symbols.

It might be possible to distinguish, but do we need them?

the suffix -goahti- behaves:

Motivation for the new border symbols:

The guiding principle behind the symbols is that they provide more information in the transducer, and it is easy to discard the information later. The opposite is not true. Also, there is relatively little work involved in adding the symbols.

North Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

Lule Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

South Sámi

TODO:

Name lexicon/risten.no infrastructure

Instead of building our own webforms and back-end update scripts, use XForms with a premade connection to our xml db. Orbeon XForms is such a tool (open source).

From the meeting with the terminology and IT teams last week:

This means the following tasks:

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 towards our first sma-nob/swe dictionary, coming today?

TODO:

Proofing tools

HFST-based proofing tools

TODO:

Hunspell

Børre has released beta7, with working clitics, negation verb and copula.

OpenXSpell

As a middle-man between Enchant and MacOS X speller API, this is still interesting. As a direct Hunspell front-end it is not, cf above.

Testing

Spelling Error Markup

TODO:

Speller testing

TODO:

Testing open-source Norwegian spellers

Sjur has invited the open-source group to test their spell-checker using our test bench. The response has been positive, we’ll see what happens.

We should go to their developer meetings, and present our work and how to work with language technology.

Speller bugs

List of bugs returned from Polderland:

Open issues based on test results:

sme

Version: Davvisámi, version 1.1, 2008-12-17

smj

Version: Julevsáme, version 1.1, 2008-12-17

TODO:

Hyphenator bugs

Open issues based on test results :

sme

Lexicon version: Davvisámi, version 1.1, 2008-12-17

smj

Lexicon version: Julevsáme, version 1.1, 2008-12-17

TODO:

Installer changes

TODO:

User documentation

TODO:

1.2 release

Content:

Other

South Sámi seminar follow-up

We should make a final list of who went to the hotel when, to check the final bill from the hotel. Sjur will discuss this with David.

Travelling plans in the coming months

Text to speech

The TTS meeting with Antti was held (without Maja and Thomas). Topics:

TNC, rikstermbanken and Sámi terms

RTB will be released:

Available at: [http://www.rikstermbanken.se]

It DOES include the Sámi terms they asked about.

Corpus contracts + open source

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

FSMNLP Pretoria 21-24 July

Call for paper. One of the themes: less-resourced lgs and fst. Should some of us send a paper?

IMPORTANT DATES:

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 30.3.2009, 9.30 Norwegian time.

The meeting was closed at 11:02.

Appendix - task lists for the next five days

Boerre

Ciprian

David

Jovsset

Per-Eric

Maja

Saara

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond