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 10:22.

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!

Trond has looked at Numra for Finnish - there were errors in it.

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

TODO

Corpus gathering

Thomas has been doing a lot of digitizing / proofreading of OCR texts. Don jih dan bijre I-III is done.

The first scanner is on its way…

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

TODO:

Infrastructure

SSH at UiT

The SSH issue was fixed last week. The divvun.no server got a new IP number.

HFST issues

HFST installation issues:

To check out from svn:

svn co https://hfst.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/hfst/trunk hfstsvn

Remove all old Fink (/sw/) and MacPorts (/opt/) installations, then compile under Snow Leopard.

VislCG 3

Everyone should have this one installed as well.

Missing installations:

Makefile + tag simplification

Present process:

  1. tailor the source files (remove lines containing SUB, GG, whatever)
  2. compile the tmp source files

Goal:

  1. compile the source files
  2. tailor the resulting transducer (subtract the strings containing SUB, GG, whatever)

Also replace xfst script files with -e “action” statements.

Old version:

iclock.fst: $(TARGET)/bin/iclock-$(TARGET).fst
$(TARGET)/bin/iclock-$(TARGET).fst: $(TARGET)/bin/clock-$(TARGET).fst
	@echo "*** iclock-$(TARGET).fst ***"
	@printf "load < $(TARGET)/bin/clock-$(TARGET).fst \n\
	invert net \n\
	save stack $@ \n\
	quit \n" >> tmp/iclock-script-$(TARGET)
	$(XFST) < tmp/iclock-script-$(TARGET)
	@rm -f tmp/iclock-script-$(TARGET)

New version:

iclock.fst: $(TARGET)/bin/iclock-$(TARGET).fst
$(TARGET)/bin/iclock-$(TARGET).fst: $(TARGET)/bin/clock-$(TARGET).fst
	@echo
	@echo "*** $(notdir $@) ***"
	@echo
	@$(XFST) -e "load < $<" \
			 -e "invert net" \
			 -e "save stack $@" \
			 -stop

General list

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
      1. done
  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

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

South Sámi

Trond has done a lot of sma during the weekend, mainly on loan words. Also many typos corrected. Point: there are many loan words in the texts we are seeing, and we need to add these loanwords, whatever the stand on loanwords is.

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

Ciprian wants to finish the first version of the Komi dictionary, and then continue with the sma dictionary. Trond wants a Mac version of the Kven dictioanry as well.

TODO:

Proofing tools

South Sámi second alpha

Maja:

Trond:

Thomas:

Tomi:

TODO:

HFST-based proofing tools

Voikko will be our near future proofing solution, using HFST as the language technology core.

Please join the libvoikko mailing list.

One article linked:

[http://voikko.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/voikko/trunk/libvoikko/doc/morphological-analysis.txt]

TODO:

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

sma

Command to test the hyphenator:

preprocess dev/corp/pressemelding.txt | lookup bin/hyph-sma.fst | cut -f2 | \
lookup bin/hyphrules-sma.fst | grep -v '^$' | cut -f2 | uniq | see

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:

Windows testing machine

TODO:

Christmas vacation / non-working days

SD: 24.12 and 31.12 are half days, and one of them off. One additional day in between is fully off.

UiT: all days in between are half days.

Who Days off
Børre off 30th and 31st
Ciprian no vacation planned
Maja XXX
Sjur no vacation planned, non-working days later
Thomas no vacation planned, non-working days later
Tomi no vacation planned
Trond no vacation planned (Sindre rehearsing for revue)

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 14.12.2009, 9.30 Norwegian time.

Sjur will be away on Thursday 3.12 and Monday-Tuesday 7.-8.12.

The meeting was closed at 11:51.

Appendix - task lists for the next week

Boerre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond