Low hanging fruit and the Boasian trilogy in digital lexicography of morphologically rich languages: Lessons from a survey of Indigenous language resources in Canada

Online lexicographical resources for the morphologically rich Indigenous languages in Canada use a wide range of strategies for conveying their language’s morphological system, i.e. how words are inflected and derived, which this paper illustrates in a survey of seventeen bilingual online resources. The strategies these resources employ boil down to two basic approaches to the underlying structure of the resource: 1) a lexical database, or 2) a computational model. Most resources we surveyed are constructed around lexical databases. These assume the word(form) as the basic unit, an assumption that makes it difficult to incorporate the language’s sub-word, morphological structure in full detail. However, one resource uses a computational morphological model to bring the language’s morphology into the core of the lexicon – this proved to be a “low-hanging fruit” in the application of language technology that had been accomplished within a reasonable time-frame, as has been advocated by Trond Trosterud. We discuss the value created and questions raised by this approach and argue that it successfully overcomes the traditional Boasian three-way partition of dictionary, grammar, and text, creating integrated language resources that meet the modern needs of low-resource endangered languages and their communities

Parallel Distributed Grammar Engineering for Practical Applications

Based on a detailed case study of parallel grammar development distributed across two sites, we review some of the requirements for regression testing in grammar engineering, summarize our approach to systematic competence and performance profiling, and discuss our experience with grammar development for a commercial application. If possible, the workshop presentation will be organized around a software demonstration

An Emotional Word Analyzer for Portuguese

The analysis of sentiments, emotions and opinions in texts is increasingly important in the current digital world. The existing lexicons with emotional annotations for the Portuguese language are oriented to polarities, classifying words as positive, negative or neutral. To identify the emotional load intended by the author it is necessary also to categorize the emotions expressed by individual words. EmoSpell is an extension of a morphological analyzer with semantic annotations of the emotional value of words. It uses Jspell as the morphological analyzer and a new dictionary with emotional annotations. This dictionary incorporates the lexical base EMOTAIX.PT, which classifies words based on three different levels of emotions - global, specific and intermediate. This paper describes the generation of the EmoSpell dictionary using three sources, the Jspell Portuguese dictionary and the lexical bases EMOTAIX.PT and SentiLex-PT. Also, this paper details the web application and web service that exploit this dictionary. It presents also a validation of the proposed approach using a corpus of student texts with different emotional loads. The validation compares the analyses provided by EmoSpell with the mentioned emotional lexical bases on the ability to recognize emotional words and extract the dominant emotion from a text

International Summerschool Computer Science 2014: Proceedings of Summerschool 7.7. - 13.7.2014

Proceedings of International Summerschool Computer Science 201

A Semi-automatic and Low Cost Approach to Build Scalable Lemma-based Lexical Resources for Arabic Verbs

International audienceThis work presents a method that enables Arabic NLP community to build scalable lexical resources. The proposed method is low cost and efficient in time in addition to its scalability and extendibility. The latter is reflected in the ability for the method to be incremental in both aspects, processing resources and generating lexicons. Using a corpus; firstly, tokens are drawn from the corpus and lemmatized. Secondly, finite state transducers (FSTs) are generated semi-automatically. Finally, FSTsare used to produce all possible inflected verb forms with their full morphological features. Among the algorithm’s strength is its ability to generate transducers having 184 transitions, which is very cumbersome, if manually designed. The second strength is a new inflection scheme of Arabic verbs; this increases the efficiency of FST generation algorithm. The experimentation uses a representative corpus of Modern Standard Arabic. The number of semi-automatically generated transducers is 171. The resulting open lexical resources coverage is high. Our resources cover more than 70% Arabic verbs. The built resources contain 16,855 verb lemmas and 11,080,355 fully, partially and not vocalized verbal inflected forms. All these resources are being made public and currently used as an open package in the Unitex framework available under the LGPL license