170428

Samest meeting 28.4.2017

Participants: Fran, Heli, Heiki, Jaak, Sjur, Sulev, Trond

Agenda

  • Võro FST and Oahpa
    • status
    • papers
  • Estonian FST
    • status
    • papers
  • Finnish-Estonian MT
    • status
    • papers
  • Estonian-Finnish MT
  • status
  • Future
  • Deadline

Võro FST and Oahpa

status

FST and Oahpa

  • temporary solution: Err/Orth for the same forms as Use/NG
  • Võro Oahpa is working now with very few mistakes
  • Oahpa-wise, the FST quality is good.
  • Lexical coverage is low (cf. possible use for spelling, Korp)
  • Problem with using synthetic voice in Oahpa: works properly only in Safari. In other browsers the first sound only is hearable.

Visualising:

  • alphabet: t a l o s a +N +Sg
  • analysis input: talossa -- output: talo+N+Sg+Ine
  • generation input: talo +N +Sg + I n e -- output: ?talossa

Anssi Yli-Jyrä, Ken Beesley, Lauri Karttunen

papers

Final version of a paper on Võro Oahpa and FST is submitted to Nodalida workshop NLP4CALL&LA.

Paper about Võro Oahpa in the Publications of Võro Institute (Heli/Sulev)?

Estonian FST

status

Heiki tried to use flag diacritics in regular expressions used as filters, and found that: Heiki-Jaan found and reported a bug in hfst-xfst related to flag diacritics and double negation.

The punctuation.lexc file included multichar symbols that were not declared

There was also a bug regarding difference between xfst and hfst (xfst lookup bug)? No, this is perhaps because of my own errors in punctuation.lexc.

    Nothing for now, but:

    1. fst + applic (focus on implementation / linguistics / impact (socioling))
    2. estonian shedding light over fst
    3. fst shedding light over estonian

    Finnish-Estonian MT

    status

    the same as before

    papers

    a demo on rakenduslingvistika konverents

    Estonian-Finnish MT

    status

    kaataa -> kaasi/kaatoi -> kaatoi (as of yesterday)

    The est-fin dictionary made by eki and kotus will be available on the net. The release will be linked to the 100th year anniversary of Estonia and Finland, a deadline is february 2018.

    Margit would like to connect dictionary and RBMT. The RBMT may be used as a substitution for the usage examples.

    Heiki hopes that we will get the lexicon to be included in apertium-fin-est also.

    The weakest point is

    • all the technical issues with tags
    • thereafter we will get to lingustics

    Sami-Estonian MT

    The student Käbi Suvi working on it will try to finish this spring

    sme-fin // fin-est ==> sme-est

    Fran: Do not use crossdict.

    • There is a 20-line python script that does intersection.
    • There is the unix join

    Võru-Estonian

    Future

    paper (congratulations!):

    Tiina Puolakainen. Semi-automatic Enhancement of Bidictionary from Aligned Sentences. 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2017), April 17 - 23, 2017, Budapest, Hungary. Preprint: http: //www.cicling.org/2017/Papers/paper%20268.pdf (auth required) ask Tiina for her pdf

    • Uibo, Heli: Võru Oahpa (NoDaLiDa)
    • Johnson et al: sme-fin MT (NoDaLiDa)

    Officially, the project time will run out in 2 days...

    Rough evaluation: at the outset: we have a FST and we want applications reality: we have spent more time on plugging in the FST in the infra than on working on the applications

    Thoughts for the future

    mt

    icall

    spellchecking

    • context-sensitive spellchecker
      • disambiguate POS/grammar category based on context, and do suggestions based upon that

    Should we go beta? http: //divvun.org/proofing/proofing.html

    There, the feedback address given is su

    grammar checking

    • Here we have a web version of a cg-based grammar checker for sme
    • ... and an implication in LibreOffice is forthcoming

    Is there some version of spellers built on current fsts available somewhere to be downloaded? (something to give ta bit more langtec-knowledgeable users to test)

    http://divvun.no (Sámi languages) and http://divvun.org (non-Sámi), a few more here (nighty builds): https://apertium.projectjj.com/spellers/nightly/

    the feedback address is support@divvun.no, and the address may be split into different addresses for different languages.

    The speller easteregg is: nuvviDspeller

    (no estonian versions seem to be there. i can probably find someone on irc to ask for those: )

    There are two estonians: the over-arching estonian = et, est the non-south estonian estonian = ekk (Standard Estonian), vro = V~

    • et.zhfst usual version
    • et-x-exp.zhfst experimental version

    context

    ???

    Priorities for the future

    • what is fun
    • what is needed
    • what can be funded
    • what can result in publications

    Taking stock

    Unpaid resources Possible funding sources

    Conference and article deadlines

    A sample from the calendar:

    http: //cs.rochester.edu/~omidb/nlpcalendar/

    • 21 May: FSMNLP 2017 (Sweden)
    • 7 Jul: IJCNLP (Taiwan)
    • 25 Sep: LREC 2018 (Japan)
    • ? ?: BalticHLT 2018 (?)

    For MT: topics?

    • fin-est: aim at better gisting than Google (real estate good, sports bad)
    • est-fin: aim at better gisting than Google
    • sme-fin: How good gisting
    • LREC
          output   link to orig
    rbmt  -        +
     smt  -        -
     nmt  +        -
    

    Other regional/non-NLP conferences possible.

    September

    1. Improve all components (fst > mt/oahpa > speller)
    2. Write the presentation

    Presentation

    • Having (est, fin, sme) and making (vro) a linguistic core
    • Putting it into use
      • MT: gisting, production
      • Oahpa: ...
      • Spelling: basic, context-driven, grammar checking
    • Feedback to basic linguistic research (mostly for vro)

    Future funding:

    • Estonian Language Technology program: sometime in the autumn Possibly also international cooperation will be supported from Estonian Lang Tech program. Both Estonian and Võro FST could be continued. Maybe also Estonian-Võro Apertium machine translation could be started?

    There is a attempt of Est-Vro MT here: voroaader (Ants Aader) but I would not trust him much - he has dealed with it for years but with no good system and results.

    (This is the guy that Jack is in contact with)

    synaq.org - est-vro-est bilingual dictionary

    (What is the licence?) Free to use

    Is it under a free software/open-source/creative commons licence that allows commercial use ?

    Not licenceced under that. You must ask permission of Võro Insitute.

    Then it cannot be used in the MT system right now (but perhaps someone can contact the Voro Institute to ask for permission)

    Of course - I am working there and I am the main composer of the dict : )

    Great! : )

    Sulev: I am iterested to continue with Võro Oahpa/FST work and Skype meetings with Heli and Jack! Regardless of funding. But of course it would need some funding in longer perspective. Estonian LangTech program 2018 international cooperation? The same with possible future Est-Vro MT on Apertium. - Vro spellcheckers etc.

    Narratives for funding

    People who make useful things people with a track record will have higher chanses

    • Link our ICALL to educational priorities in Estonia
    • Link our Võro work to language preservation and revitalisation (Estonian Min of Education? Kone Säätiö? ...)

    Estonian: Make ourself useful for Eki (e.g. the MT aspect for the forthcoming dictionary). EKI with Võro Institute are dealing with Võro speech synthesiser. They/we need our Võro FST for that.

    Next meetings

    • At Nodalida 22-24 May in Gothenburg (Heiki, Heli, Trond, Jaak?, Jack?) (first evening?)
    • Skype: June, August
    • Next Võro Oahpa/FST meeting - could be in May!