User:Jmundo1/Final project
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Transducer for Hiaki
For my final project, I created a prototype transducer for the Hiaki language, a language extremely lacking in computational resources. The implementation includes the following notable or unusual functonality, in addition to standard treatment of nouns, verbs, pronouns, postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, and other common Hiaki word types:
Variation in Verb Forms
Hiaki verb forms exhibit somewhat idiosyncratic variation in their roots depending on whether derivational suffixation appears. This process could not be automated because of the idiosyncracy, but the lexicon is built so both forms of a root verb can be placed and the transducer will be sure only to generate the right one.
Noun Incorporation
Hiaki nouns and pronouns can be incorporated into verbs, losing their case morphology and becoming part of the single word. The transducer is structured to handle incorporation of arbitrary nouns into arbitrary verbs.
Due to the computational complexity of noun incorporaiton, it is currently disabled. However, pronoun incorporation, which occurs vastly more frequently in the corpus, remains enabled.
Reduplication
Many Hiaki verbs reduplicate productively to indicate, for instance, the habitual aspect on verbs, or plurality on adjectives. Functionality for reduplication is partially implemented using .twol rules. However, due to the complexity of Hiaki reduplication and the idiosyncracies across verbs regarding what part of the verb reduplicates, the implementation should not yet be considered complete.
Evaluation
Coverage was tested over a corpus. Little text is readily available in Hiaki, so the corpus used only has 3254 words. To continue work on the transducer, it is likely a larger corpus would need to be compiled.
