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 09:54.

Present: Børre, Ciprian, Maja, Sjur, Thomas, Tomi, Trond

Absent: none

Agenda accepted as is.

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Oahpa!

Ciprian has made a sandbox for Oahpa, for testing out new features and scripts before adding them to the production site.

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

TODO

Corpus gathering

Scanners not yet ordered, Eplehuset is very slow, Børre will talk to Leif Åge about alternative and faster channels.

Setting up tesserac for automatized OCR (open-source).

Maja will call Risten about one contract left-over from Joseph.

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

TODO:

Infrastructure

XServe has now replaced the G5, which turned out to be too unstable. The aliases g5 and xs both will start an ssh connection to the XServe. It serves as the web server for both [http://divvun.no] and [http://giellatekno.uit.no].

divvun.no is now static HTML files generated by Forrest.

HFST 2.x is now released, and seems to work fine. Some initial quirks have been worked out.

There are some differences in the lookup output:

Xerox:
sajis   sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+VGen
sajis   sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+Imprt+ConNeg
sajis   sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+Imprt+Sg2
sajis   sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+Ind+Prs+ConNeg
sajis   sadji+N+Sg+Loc
sajis   sadji+N+Sg+Acc+PxSg3
sajis   sadji+N+Sg+Gen+PxSg3
sajis   sajis+Adv
sajis   sajis+Po

HFST:
sajis
sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+Ind+Prs+ConNeg#
sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+Imprt+Prs+Sg2#
sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+Imprt+Prs+ConNeg#
sadjit+V+TV+Der1+Der/st+V+VGen#
sadji+N+Sg+Gen+PxSg3#
sadji+N+Sg+Acc+PxSg3#
sadji+N+Sg+Loc#
sajis+Adv#
sajis+Po#

~$echo sajis | usme | lookup2cg
"<sajis>"
	 "sajis" Po
	 "sajis" Adv
	 "sadjit" V* TV Der1 Der/st V Imprt Sg2
	 "sadji" N Sg Loc
	 "sadjit" V* TV Der1 Der/st V Imprt ConNeg
	 "sadji" N Sg Acc PxSg3
	 "sadjit" V* TV Der1 Der/st V VGen
	 "sadji" N Sg Gen PxSg3
	 "sadjit" V* TV Der1 Der/st V Ind Prs ConNeg

"<humaheapmi>"
	 "humahit" V* TV Der2 Der/eapmi N Sg Nom
...

The hash mark is explained here.

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
    1. this is now a real option (HFST2 is released), reqiures Makefile enhancements
  9. corpus content moved to Max Planck repositories? Norsk språkbank?
  10. update infrastructure to allow content-restricted spellers for special target groups

TODO:

Linguistics

North Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

Lule Sámi

Lene has been working hard on the dis files for smj, because of the upcoming conference Lapponic 3. Lexical additions are welcome, so have a look at a missing list near you, if you feel for it.

South Sámi

Maja wants some help with the loanword text and discussion.

The propernoun analysis should (now when the speller is in an alpha state) be promoted upwards on our agenda, and propernouns added.

TODO:

Name lexicon/risten.no infrastructure

Tomi has played with couchdb as a replacement for eXist in risten.no and general dictionary-related work. Seems much lighter and easier to work with.

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. send eXist log files to Ciprian (Sjur)
  2. fix i18n bug in risten.no/G5 (so they will work without the proper locale request) (Sjur)
  3. fix bugs in lexc2xml; add comments to the log element (Saara)
  4. finish first version of the editing (Sjur)
  5. test editing of the xml files. If ok, then: (Sjur, Thomas, Trond)
  6. 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)
  7. convert propernoun-($lang)-lex.txt to a derived file from common xml files (Sjur, Tomi, Saara)
  8. 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)
  9. start to use the xml file as source file
  10. clean terms-sme.xml such that all names have the correct tag for their use (e.g. @type=secondary) (Thomas, linguists)
  11. merge placenames which are errouneously in different entries: e.g. Helsinki, Helsingfors, Helsset (linguists)
  12. publish the name lexicon on risten.no (Sjur)
  13. add missing parallel names for placenames (linguists)
  14. add informative links between first names like Niillas and Nils (linguists)

Dictionaries

Komi work is progressing. The meeting last week was clarifying. The work on Komi is also a nice exercise for the make remake task.

Lemma selection on the dictionary for pronouns: Persons as lemma forms, yes, but not case.

After Komi & Kildin, Ciprian would like to return to sma with some help from Maja.

TODO:

Proofing tools

South Sámi (pre)alpha

Maja:

Trond:

Thomas:

A rule like the following should not be necessary - simple transpositions like this is handled quite well by the default speller setup:

b>p => bluevie>pluevie, Aarborte>Aarporte

TODO:

HFST-based proofing tools

TODO:

Hunspell

No further development. See our download page for the latest beta.

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:

Tag reordering for abbreviations have caused a lot of problems:

smj:
hr.
hr.	hr+ABBR+Acc
cand.philol.
cand.philol.	cand.philol+ABBR+N+Acc
Per
Per	Per+N+Prop+Mal+Sg+Attr

sme:
hr.
hr.	hr+N+ABBR+Acc
Per
Per	Per+N+Prop+Mal+Sg+Attr

Open issues based on test results:

sme

Version: Davvisámi, version 1.2, 2009-09-18

smj

Version: Julevsáme, version 1.2, 2009-09-20

TODO:

Hyphenator bugs

Open issues based on test results :

sme

Lexicon version: Davvisámi, version 1.2, 2009-09-18

No known issues!

smj

Lexicon version: Julevsáme, version 1.2, 2009-09-20

TODO:

Installer changes

TODO:

User documentation

TODO:

1.2 release

Content:

Other

Autumn planning

Text to speech

TODO:

MT and CAT

TODO:

Open source

The repository is properly closed/open now, and the availability of the source code should be announced.

TODO:

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 26.10.2009, 9.30 Norwegian time.

Ciprian will be away.

The meeting was closed at 11:53.

Appendix - task lists for the next week

Boerre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

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