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!

Bodø is coming up, Ciprian need to start the preparations for it this week.

Aejege will apply for money for a sma Oahpa! Hopefully they will get it. A sma Oahpa! will have some impact on the work on the transducers.

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

TODO

Corpus gathering

Thomas: one book has to be re-OCR-ed because of a settings error, the rest is going fine. Now error-marking the OCR result.

Which books are digitized?

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

TODO:

Infrastructure

Makefile + tag simplification

TODO:

  1. convert comment tags to real lexc tags when the discussion is over (Tomi)
  2. adjust gt/Makefile to grep on the new tags such that the old make targets work (Tomi)
  3. add the new tags to the tags-not-save.regex file (this will remove them from the regular analyzer) => the transducers and their output should be identical to the earlier versions (Tomi)
  4. write new build commands (Sjur, Tomi)
  5. when the new build infrastructure works as it should, delete the old ones (Sjur, Tomi)

General list

Børre: iCal, Jabber, wiki, Bugzilla are all running fine on the test machine. There are two test users, see iChat. One user is defined using Open Directory, the other is a local user with ssh access. Both users have access to all services.

Upgrade schedule for the XServe:

To accommodate 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 complete
  2. set up the Snow Leopard Server features for collaborative support:
    1. iCal server / group calendars
    2. wiki
  3. wiki? on G5 (is part of Snow Leopard Server) or other web-based documentation
  4. improve Forrest stability and i18n support ( the divvun crashes)
  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. corpus content moved to Max Planck repositories? Norsk språkbank?
  9. update infrastructure to allow content-restricted spellers for special target groups

TODO:

Linguistics

Hyphenation of loan words: Thomas would like to have a meeting about this with Maja, Trond, Lene. He will send an e-mail about it.

North Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

Lule Sámi

(nothing new, see proofing bugs below)

South Sámi

Numerals:

Three types of problem areas:

We also seem to have problems with derivations:

jealadehtedh   jieliedehtedh	jieledh+V+Der1+Der/dehte+V+Inf
galmadehtedh   galmedehtedh	galmedidh+V+Der2+Der/ehte+V+Inf

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

A new sma:nob-swe version coming within an hour. A stressless version should be ready for Feb. 6. Also kom:fin-eng is coming soon, as well as a first fkv:nob dictionary.

Noone has answered the type question regarding the sma:nob-swe dictionary. Sjur will answer the mail.

TODO:

Proofing tools

South Sámi

Tomi has compiled new spellers after the hyphenation fix. We really need to do gold standard testing now.

TODO:

HFST-based proofing tools

The work with Voikko+HFST is slowly moving forward.

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

Tronds topics

Separate smaller meetings during the week:

Spring planning

Topics:

Dates:

Text to speech

TODO:

MT and CAT

TODO:

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 25.1.2010, 9.30 Norwegian time.

The meeting was closed at 10:38.

Appendix - task lists for the next week

Boerre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond