User:Firespeaker/Apertium-turkic talk outline

Sketch for talk on Writing Turkic-language morphological transducers using HFST (for MT) on October 2nd.

Morphological transducers: what and why

• slide 1: definition, example (sample input/output)
• slide 2: use in RBMT, specifically apertium
• slide 3: other uses: spell checkers, ...?

Turkic languages

Geographical/demographic overview of Turkic languages

• slides 4, 5?
  • a map, numbers of speakers, wikipedia presence

Morphological and phonological properties encountered in Turkic languages

(these are all to be taken as "challenges for morphological transducers")

• slide 5: Agglutination
• slide 6: Vowel harmony
• slide 7: Consonantal processes
• slide 8: "buffer" segments
• slide 9: Cyrillic orthographical issues
• something on morpho-syntactic issues that've come up a lot
  • no suffix can attach to "any word", "any part of speech" or even e.g. "all nouns"; often suffixes recur in very specific sorts of places; it's almost like we have dozens of POSes
    • We don't want to overanalyse(/overgenerate)
      • disambig issues
      • testvoc issues
  • Adjective classes (e.g., whether used as <attr>/<subst>/<advl>, +comparative, etc.)
  • Non-finite verb forms
  •  ?

Developing a morphological transducer

• Important resources to start with:
  • a corpus
  • some grammars and dictionaries
  • linguistic knowledge of the language (if you want to get into it deeply)
  • native speakers!
    • ability to work with informants
    • patience!
    • cf. Chuvash (i.e., the native speakers hopefully agree on forms)

HFST and how we use it

• slide: HFST: what and who
• slide: our purposes: using two two-level systems together for a three-level system (?):
  • slide: overview of lexc and why it was chosen
  • slide: overview of twol and why it was chosen

Examples: how morphophonological issues above are dealt with

• bing
• bang
• bam

State of affairs now with apertium-turkic

• Turkic languages