Siciliano y castellano/Informe final

Commitment

The list of all commits: https://apertium.projectjj.com/gsoc2016/uliana-sentsova.html

Monolingual Sicilian dictionary:

Bilingual Sicilian-Spanish dictionary: https://svn.code.sf.net/p/apertium/svn/incubator/apertium-scn-spa/

Project goals and challenging issues

corpus, coverage, testvoc, pending tests

Constraint grammar

Constraint Grammar rules allow us to distinguish words with different grammatical tags and words with different lexical meanings based on the grammatical and lexical context. CG rules work both for disambiguation within one part of speech and between words of different categories.

The following cases of grammatical ambiguity were handled with CG rules in the Sicilian package.

• Disambiguation within one part of speech. The coincidence of verb forms within one verb paradigm occurs fairly often in Sicilian language. For instance, all Sicilian verbs demonstrate coinciding forms for first, second and third forms of Present Subjunctive. Regular verbs of the 2-nd conjugation have the same forms for Present Indicative of the first and the second person, Present Indicative of the third person singular usually coincides with the Imperative of the second person plural by verbs of the first conjugation.

• Disambiguation between words of different categories. Since "-a", "-i" and "-u" are standard endings for Sicilian nouns, adjectives, and verb forms, there are much more ambiguous wordforms in Sicilian than one can expect. A lot of Sicilian masculine nouns coincide with Present Indicative of regular verbs (like "munni" that is both plural of "munnu" and present of "munnari"), feminine nouns can match Imperative . Conversion as word formation in Sicilian is also often the reason of ambiguous word forms.

Here is the list of ambiguous Sicilian and Spanish sentences that can be used to test the set of CG rules.

A good example is the Sicilian noun"cristianu" that not only signifies a person of Christian faith but can also denote a human being in general.

A total number of CG rules: 61.

Transfer rules Sicilian and Spanish differ in structure

by the use of transfer rules. Transfer rules help to make a better translation when syntactic differences between languages that cannot be translated directly.

• Unlike in Spanish, the synthetic future is no longer in use in Sicilian language, therefore it is replaced by the periphrastic compound forms with common verbs like "jiri", "vèniri" or "aviri".
• The synthetic conditional forms of verbs are normally replaced by indicative or subjunctive forms.
• Both Siciliana and Spanish have verb constructions with passive and modal meaning. Transfer rules are used to translate them correctly where the structure of phrasal constructions doesn't coincide in these languages.
• The transfer rules allow translating a non-reflexive verb in the which is often the case.
• Sicilian and Spanish bear some resemblance in word order, however, they demonstrate some subtle differences, for example, in the case of articles and pronouns.

A total number of transfer rules: 40.

Statistics

Coverage	Sicilian-castellano (%)	Castellano-siciliano (%)
Trimmed coverage	83.4%	%
Coverage	Sicilian (%)	Spanish (%)
Raw coverage'	85.5%	91,6%

The number of lemmas in bilingual dictionary: 11,253.

The number of lemmas in Sicilian dictionary: 13,140.

Challenging issues

1. Abundance of spelling forms

2. Accent system

3. Pronouns

examples (jardinu / iardinu / giardinu = ‘garden’, palora / parola /paràula /palàura = ‘word’).

cunjùnciri, cognùngiri, conjùngiri, cugnùnciri, cognùncici, coniùngiri, conjùnciri

TODO

Future work

Syntactic properties, more rules, automatic forms merge algorithm TODO

Resources

https://scn.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A0ggina_principali

https://scn.wiktionary.org/wiki/P%C3%A0ggina_principali

Bonner, Introduction to Sicilian Grammar

El nuovo dizionario siciliano-italiano