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 09:50.

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

Absent: Maja (on study leave)

Agenda accepted as is.

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Oahpa!

Worked a bit on Kildin Sámi, nothing else.

TODO

Corpus gathering

Thomas continuously scanning more texts.

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

TODO:

Infrastructure

Updated corpus online

Trond would need an alignment of all parallel text (sme-nob) as well as a reanalysis of the whole sme corpus, to put on the Oslo corpus server, by May 6th.

TODO:

  1. convert to xml, should be done already (Ciprian)
  2. identify parallel nob files - should be automatic, but needs to be checked (Ciprian)
  3. sentence-align sme with nob (Ciprian)
  4. analyse/disambiguate (Ciprian)
  5. preferably also dep -> check with Oslo if it can be used (Ciprian)
  6. install in Oslo (Ciprian, Trond)

Corpus infra remake

TODO:

License

TODO:

Corpus interface

TODO:

Makefile + tag simplification

TODO:

  1. convert lexc files - all in gt/ dir tree && update existing make targets to work with the converted lexc files:
    1. convert lexc files for testing old make targets (Tomi)
    2. update makefile (old targets) (Tomi)
    3. announce imminent converstion - Tuesday afternoon (Tomi)
    4. everybody check in all local lexc changes in the gt/ tree - Wednesday (all)
    5. actual lexc conversion - Thursday (Tomi)
    6. announce conversion done (and new conventions) (Tomi)
    7. svn up, and continue lexc work using new lexc tags (all)
      1. all done
  2. write new build commands (Sjur, Tomi)
    1. next up, high priority
  3. when the new build infrastructure works as it should, delete the old ones (Sjur, Tomi)

General list

Now that we have the FIN-CG from Fred Karlsson, we also need a way of integrating Omorfi in a proper way with our svn repository. External references could be one alternative. We have to find a way of doing this consistently, there might be other code repositories we want to integrate with as well (e.g. Apertium).

Meänkieli adaptions in our infrastructure.

Requirements:

Tentative task list

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

Nothing new.

Comming releases:

Other things dictionary-related:

TODO:

Proofing tools

South Sámi

Beta release: June 1. We should be getting the Polderland (now Knowledge Concepts - hereafter KC) binaries in the second half of May.

Update: no updated contract proposal yet from KC despite promises. The lack of response from them is concerning, and poses a risk for the project and its abilities for reaching the planed goals. We need to start planning for an alternative proofing solution, based on Voikko.

Sjur has been in talks with Krister Lindén about whether the HFST team can speed up the development of the HFST code, and the speller and hyphenator parts of it. He will continue the talks.

TODO:

HFST- and Voikko-based proofing tools

We need to test the Sámi analysers with the latest LibVoikko, and give feedback to Harry Pitkänen (the lead Voikko developer) within this week.

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

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 3.5.2010, 13:00 Norwegian time.

The meeting was closed at 10:48.

Appendix - task lists for the next week

Boerre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond