Language Technology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway

The Divvun and Giellatekno teams build language technology aimed at minority and indigenous languages

View GiellaLT on GitHub divvungiellatekno/giellalt.uit.no

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Meeting setup

Agenda

Cf. one of the following, depending on context:

Opening, agenda review, participants

Opened at 09:54.

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

Absent: Trond

Agenda accepted as is.

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Oahpa!

Ciprian has done some experiments on semi-automatically build new language dictionary pairs mainly for Oahpa, but also other dictionaries. The results were quite disappointing, though.

We have 1 application in for Oahpa (smea-oahpa), and there are plans to send in 2 more (sme-oahpa (NU) and sje-oahpa (to NFR, as part of a larger sje projects).

TODO

Corpus gathering

Thomas has scanned 6-7 books (a couple of big ones, the rest small books).

Maja has sent a number of letters to Julie, but Julie won’t have time to send out those letters. Instead, Børre will train Maja in WebSak, and we’ll use taht system to transfer the letter “tasks” to someone who can print and sign the letters when they are ready.

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

Trond has talked to RV, who was happy that the costs could be going down. Suggested a trip to Russia.

TODO:

Infrastructure

Corpus infra remake

Everything is now transferred, only the content in the upload dir is missing. Now the conversion and other scripts should be updated.

TODO:

License

Cip: we need a sum up of the discussion. Also have a look at the dict.cc license. How many languages should the license be in? Which language should be legally binding? All?

Programme, die Daten von dict.cc verwenden, müssen der GPL unterliegen. Die Übersetzungsdaten selbst dürfen nicht mit dem Programm mitgeliefert werden, sondern der Benutzer muss aufgefordert werden, die benötigte Datei für den eigenen Gebrauch direkt von dict.cc herunterzuladen

TODO:

Corpus interface

TODO:

Makefile + tag simplification

TODO:

  1. test that the output from the new transducers is identical to the old one (Tomi)
  2. write new build commands (Sjur, Tomi)
  3. when the new build infrastructure works as it should, delete the old ones (Sjur, Tomi)

General list

Trond will write an e-mail to the fit group explaining our situation.

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. improve Forrest i18n support with static sites
  3. 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
  4. 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)
  5. change the look of the documentation web
  6. corpus content moved to Max Planck repositories? Norsk språkbank?
  7. 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

TODO:

Name lexicon/risten.no infrastructure

TODO:

Dictionaries

The SME-NOB dictionary will be recompiled and updated, integrating things we learned in the SMA-NOB dictionary, like á-a relaxation.

Verena is still working on the Kven dictionary.

The XXE dictionary config has been updated to now also allow fast splitting of translations (one-step splitting).

TODO:

Proofing tools

South Sámi

TODO:

HFST-based proofing tools

The work with Voikko+HFST is 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

Thursday inhouse seminar

Next time suggestion list:

  1. introduction to xslt - Ciprian to start out
    1. relevant xslt issues:
    2. basic principles of xslt …
    3. sorting in xslt … (have a look at the dictionary sort xslt script)
    4. converting from one xml format to another wilt xslt (sugg: convert from DivvunGT dictionary dtd to MacDict xml)

Future seminars:

  1. XQuery
  2. More XML (needs concretisation)
  3. UML
  4. other suggestions?

Spring planning

Topics:

Dates:

Text to speech

TODO:

CAT

Autshuhamo-ITE is now available, and we want to set up a proof-of-concept server to demonstrate how we (soon) can provide a translator’s workbench with integrated machine translation (and also dictionary and terminology content).

Apertium installed at:

/opt/MT/
/opt/MT/apertium3.0.4

Apertium is working in victorio, with one dirty fix: I had to make the following link:

apertium-nn-nb$echo ikke |apertium -d . nb-nn
ikkje

TODO:

Norsk språkbank

Sámi will form a part of Norsk språkbank. We should consider candidates for pilot content (preferably terminology or bilingual text) for a first presentation of Språkbanken.

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 19.04.2010, 13:00 Norwegian time.

The meeting was closed at 12:14.

Appendix - task lists for the next week

Boerre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond