Miskito/Final project

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Revision as of 14:45, 20 May 2021 by Sjones5 (talk | contribs) (Problems Encountered)

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Overview

Over the course of the semester, we've worked on developing a rule based machine translation (RBMT) system for Miskito utilizing apertium resources.

Implementation/Solution

For our final project we decided to focus on our monolingual transducer and improve it as much as possible. Specifically, we directed our attention to the .lexd and .twol files to encode grammatical generalizations. We managed to implement a large range of morphological analysis for our language.

  • Verb tense morphology
    • Absolute Past
    • Present
    • Present Progressive
    • Absolute Future
    • Future
  • Irregular Verb Morphology
  • Negation in the present tense
  • Possessive Noun morphology

With just a combined set of around 230 nouns and verbs, we achieved an impressive amount of coverage detailed below.

Problems Encountered

  • Limited Resources

As Miskito has only ~140,000 native speakers, there were limited available resources to pull from in the creation of these language tools. Additionally, some of the resources we found were very dated or did not function very well.

  • Reliable Information

We were able to make use of a couple of dictionaries and grammar workbooks. However, we found there were inconsistencies between these sources, which caused implementing some components of Miskito to be rather challenging.

  • Implementing Morphological Rules

Areas to Fix

  • Full coverage of possessive noun morphology
  • Adjective morphology

Developed Resources

We expanded our morphological analyzer's capabilities by adding in

Evaluation

To evaluate our progress, we used the metric coverage-hfst to record our overall corpus coverage. Below is our reported results.

Initial Corpus Coverage

  • Coverage: 3873 / 7569 (~0.51169242964724534285)
  • Remaining unknown forms: 3696

Final Corpus Coverage

  • Coverage: 5987 / 7588 (~0.78900896151818661044)
  • Remaining unknown forms: 1601