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

Updated task status since last meeting

Børre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond

Oahpa!

Today’s number is 450 000,- NOK. We got our sma Oahpa! project:)

Seminar in Trondheim on lexicography and spelling. What about joining the two, or having partial overlap?

Points to consider:

Content for seminar - ideas:

Ciprian has corrected an error in the Finnish Oahpa, and proper nouns are now working. Oahpa for SMS still needs some work.

Ciprian is planning to add a virtual keyboard to the Cyrillik Oahpa pages, cf. the Google search pages using one of the “native” languages (Finnish or Swedish). This will enable typing of “foreign” characters not supported by the physical keyboard of the user.

TODO

Corpus gathering

Børre has talked with Per Christian Biti last week. He is going to talk to the board about a more regular and deeper cooperation with us, with automatic and regular updates of everything from avvir.no. As a counter-service, he would like to get more frequent and regular updates of the speller lexicons from us.

Sjur, on this trip to Karasjok, got an understanding from the top level bosses that we need SD texts. We will work together with the IT team to make this happen, especially all parallel texts.

TODO:

Promoting Divvun

Rune Fjelheim suggested last week that we should start a separate project to inform about, teach about and install our language technology tools (not only Divvun). This would also make a very good feedback channel.

TODO:

Future plans, directions and ideas

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

Northern areas project

First major obstacle: make working keyboards and fonts.

Write trustworthy and detailed documentation (in Russian)

What we know:

TODO:

Infrastructure

Out of the box experiences:

Updated corpus online

See Ciprian´s document about the corpus content in $GTPRIV/plan/corpus/oslo_corpus_update_todo.txt.

Issues:

facta$convert2xml.pl --nolog --corpdir=/usr/local/share/corp L1allOrt.correct.txt

Error message:

sh: /home/sjur/gtmain/gt/script/text_cat: No such file or directory
L1allOrt.correct.txt: ERROR errors in /home/sjur/gtmain/gt/script/text_cat -q \
   -x -d /home/sjur/gtmain/gt/script/LM "/usr/local/share/corp/tmp/L1allOrt.correct.txt.tmp0":

text_cat isn’t part of our repository, we need to add it - we are using a modified version of the original file. It should be added with a short README and some license info, pointing to the original.

TODO:

Corpus infra remake

Børre: has worked on convert2xml.pl, seems to work in most of the cases. Has also added svg2corpus conversion.

TODO:

License

TODO:

Corpus interface

This depends on the infrastructure cleanup.

TODO:

Makefile + tag simplification

Problems with the proofing tools compilation, now solved.

TODO:

  1. test latest proofing tools, compare results with previous version (Tomi)
  2. write new build commands (Sjur, Tomi)
    1. make new targets in parallell to the old ones, not by remaking them
    2. use a prefix or suffix to make the new targets easily identifyable during the rewrite phase. We’ll remove the prefix/suffix as soon as everything is working fine.
      1. a first version commited, prefix is NEW-*
  3. test the new build commands (Sjur, Trond, Lene, Thomas)
    1. kommando: make TARGET=sme NEW-fst etc.
  4. when the new build infrastructure works as it should, delete the old ones (Sjur, Tomi)

General list

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

Ciprian has been able to compile a text-formatted (as opposed to xml-structured) StarDict dictionary for use with Autshumato-ITE/OmegaT. It works quite well, and with the “intelligent” version it also allows lookup of inflected word forms. For the future, we should add a transducer (+ disambiguation?) step in between, so that we don’t have to use the full-form dictionary.

StarDict is useless for Cyrillic languages, mainly because of the scanning function (ie point and look-up). We need to find an alternative to StarDict. Also, the Kildin Sámi users have different needs than we have had in mind. And they don’t have access to a Kildin Sámi keyboard in Windows.

Released:

Other things dictionary-related:

TODO:

Proofing tools

Spelling feedback from Malta:

South Sámi

Beta release: June 15. We should be getting the Polderland (now Knowledge Concepts - hereafter KC) binaries in the second half of May.

TODO:

HFST- and Voikko-based proofing tools

Sjur met with the HFST people yesterday. Two things happening in parallell:

  1. hfst3 - being made ready for public release, with proper inclusion of autotools, and updated documentation
  2. speller/lookup library:
    1. speller/lookup library
    2. voikko integration of this library

TODO:

Testing

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.

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

Trond: start to make yearly reports

There are a lot of things happening, and it would be nice to sum up the activities for each year to make them visible for relevant people.

TODO

sma seminar in August/September

Theme:

Who can? yes/no
Børre yes
Ciprian yes, in September
Maja yes
Sjur yes
Thomas yes
Tomi yes
Trond yes, 30.8-3.9 (v 35), 13.9.->

Should we do this? YES.

TODO:

CLARIN meeting

Two possible appications:

September 21-22 there is a steering committee meeting in “Språkbanken” about scanning texts. Before or after that meeting there should be a more detailed presentation about HFST, spellers and OCR.

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?

Summer planning

Topics:

Dates:

Text to speech

There will be regular meetings in this project from now on, every second week.

TODO:

CAT

TODO:

Summer vacations

Name Dates
Børre 28/6-11/7, 2/8-15/8
Ciprian Dates
Maja Dates
Sjur Dates
Thom 21/6-23/7
Tomi 5 weeks between 21/6-13/8
Trond Dates

Next meeting, closing

The next meeting is 28.6.2010, 09:30 Norwegian time.

The meeting was closed at 12:18.

Appendix - task lists for the next week

Boerre

Ciprian

Maja

Sjur

Thomas

Tomi

Trond