A morphological analyser for Maltese

This article describes the development of a free/open-source morphological description of Maltese, originally created as the analysis component in a rule-based machine translation system for Maltese to Arabic and later applied to other tasks. The lexicon formalism we use is lttoolbox, part of the Apertium machine translation platform. An evaluation of the analyser shows that the coverage is adequate, at 84.90%, while precision is 92.5% on a large automatically annotated test set and 96.2% on a smaller hand-validated set.peer-reviewe

Crowd-sourcing evaluation of automatically acquired, morphologically related word groupings

The automatic discovery and clustering of morphologically related words is an important problem with several practical applications. This paper describes the evaluation of word clusters carried out through crowd-sourcing techniques for the Maltese language. The hybrid (Semitic-Romance) nature of Maltese morphology, together with the fact that no large-scale lexical resources are available for Maltese, make this an interesting and challenging problem.peer-reviewe

Morphological analysis for the Maltese language : the challenges of a hybrid system

Maltese is a morphologically rich language with a hybrid morphological system which features both concatenative and non-concatenative processes. This paper analyses the impact of this hybridity on the performance of machine learning techniques for morphological labelling and clustering. In particular, we analyse a dataset of morphologically related word clusters to evaluate the difference in results for concatenative and non-concatenative clusters. We also describe research carried out in morphological labelling, with a particular focus on the verb category. Two evaluations were carried out, one using an unseen dataset, and another one using a gold standard dataset which was manually labelled. The gold standard dataset was split into concatenative and non-concatenative to analyse the difference in results between the two morphological systems.non peer-reviewe

Report on second selection of resources, revising selection in D2.1

The central objective of the Metanet4u project is to contribute to the establishment of a pan-European digital platform that makes available language resources and services, encompassing both datasets and software tools, for speech and language processing, and supports a new generation of exchange facilities for them.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Recent advances in Apertium, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform for low-resource languages

This paper presents an overview of Apertium, a free and open-source rule-based machine translation platform. Translation in Apertium happens through a pipeline of modular tools, and the platform continues to be improved as more language pairs are added. Several advances have been implemented since the last publication, including some new optional modules: a module that allows rules to process recursive structures at the structural transfer stage, a module that deals with contiguous and discontiguous multi-word expressions, and a module that resolves anaphora to aid translation. Also highlighted is the hybridisation of Apertium through statistical modules that augment the pipeline, and statistical methods that augment existing modules. This includes morphological disambiguation, weighted structural transfer, and lexical selection modules that learn from limited data. The paper also discusses how a platform like Apertium can be a critical part of access to language technology for so-called low-resource languages, which might be ignored or deemed unapproachable by popular corpus-based translation technologies. Finally, the paper presents some of the released and unreleased language pairs, concluding with a brief look at some supplementary Apertium tools that prove valuable to users as well as language developers. All Apertium-related code, including language data, is free/open-source and available at https://github.com/apertium

Germling culture and molecular analysis of evasive micro-filamentous green algae growing in the Maltese islands (central Mediterranean)

Acknowledgements This research was partially funded by the ENDEAVOUR Scholarship Scheme (Malta)- Group B – National Funds and by the Fusion R&I Research Excellence Programme through the Malta Council for Science and Technology. The study was also supported by the University of Malta, the Environment and Resources Authority (Malta), the Total Foundation (Paris) and the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland pooling initiative (MASTS), the latter funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011) and contributing institutions. Thanks are due to Akira F. Peters for germling isolation and to Eleni Kytinou for diving assistance.Peer reviewedPostprin

MASRI-HEADSET: A Maltese Corpus for Speech Recognition

Maltese, the national language of Malta, is spoken by approximately 500,000 people. Speech processing for Maltese is still in its early stages of development. In this paper, we present the first spoken Maltese corpus designed purposely for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The MASRI-HEADSET corpus was developed by the MASRI project at the University of Malta. It consists of 8 hours of speech paired with text, recorded by using short text snippets in a laboratory environment. The speakers were recruited from different geographical locations all over the Maltese islands, and were roughly evenly distributed by gender. This paper also presents some initial results achieved in baseline experiments for Maltese ASR using Sphinx and Kaldi. The MASRI-HEADSET Corpus is publicly available for research/academic purposes.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, 1 appendix. Appears in Proceedings of the 12th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC'20

Multi-scale structure, pasting and digestibility of adlay (Coixlachryma-jobi L.) seed starch

peer-reviewedThe hierarchical structure, pasting and digestibility of adlay seed starch (ASS) were investigated compared with maize starch (MS) and potato starch (PS). ASS exhibited round or polyglonal morphology with apparent pores/channels on the surface. It had a lower amylose content, a looser and more heterogeneous C-type crystalline structure, a higher crystallinity, and a thinner crystalline lamellae. Accordingly, ASS showed a higher slowly digestible starch content combined with less resistant starch fractions, and a decreased pasting temperature, a weakened tendency to retrogradation and an increased pasting stability compared with those of MS and PS. The ASS structure-functionality relationship indicated that the amylose content, double helical orders, crystalline lamellar structure, and surface pinholes should be responsible for ASS specific functionalities including pasting behaviors and in vitro digestibility. ASS showed potential applications in health-promoting foods which required low rearrangement during storage and sustainable energy-providing starch fractions

Laurencia mediterranea sp. nov. (Ceramiales, Rhodophyta) from the central Mediterranean Sea

Acknowledgements This research was funded by an award to GZ (grant REP-2022-001), for the Project ‘GreASE’, financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Research Excellence Programme’. AGB was supported by the ENDEAVOUR Scholarship Scheme (Malta)- Group B – National Funds. FCK would like to acknowledge the TOTAL Foundation (Paris) and the MASTS pooling initiative (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland), which is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011).Peer reviewe