Difference between revisions of "User:Zkelly1/Final project"

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(Features)
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*Noun and postposition possession  
 
*Noun and postposition possession  
 
*Adjectival suffix affixation to nouns
 
*Adjectival suffix affixation to nouns
 +
*Base forms of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc
 
*Extensive handling of phonological rules
 
*Extensive handling of phonological rules
  

Revision as of 13:06, 8 May 2022

Project Description

In deciding what to create for our final project, we settled on expanding our Navajo morphological transducer because of the potential benefits a working morphological transducer can bring to the speech community and the survival of the language. Navajo is currently classified as a threatened language, meaning its speech community is declining, as it is not being passed down. However, there are still roughly 7,000 monolingual speakers and roughly 150,000 total speakers. There is no better time for a tool like a morphological transducer because using the transducer, resources may be made, such as language learning apps, spellcheckers, and machine translation software, to stop the decline of the language and even encourage growth, with even possible future community input into its development, greatly improving it with native speakers' understanding of the language.

Past Work & Resources

Navajo has been extensively documented and studied, both by the community internally and by outside academics. Navajo speakers have produced resources such as dictionaries and bilingual translations of media, like a dub of the first Star Wars movie. Academics working with the community have produced large quantities of grammars, dictionaries, and papers covering the features of the language. These resources have been crucial to the development of our transducer and we believe, with the resources in existence and with the help of the community, the transducer could be among these invaluable resources for the language.

Features

  • Verb generation in all 5 modes, both classifier groups
  • Noun and postposition possession
  • Adjectival suffix affixation to nouns
  • Base forms of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc
  • Extensive handling of phonological rules

Evaluation

Future Work

Currently, what the transducer lacks most of all is two things: breadth of vocabulary and a full, complete breakdown of verb generation. The transducer does have ~308 stems in its lexicon, however, for instance, this only includes roughly 50 nouns and 5 verbs, particularly because of the difficulty of verb generation and the morphology present in almost every aspect of the language that we worked throughout the semester to implement. We implemented possession of both nouns and postpositions, adjectival suffix affixation, over 39 phonological rules, and verbs in all 5 modes generated from their component thematic prefix, classifier, and stem. That being the case, the thematic prefix in Navajo can be optional, as well as broken down even further into its component parts. In the future, we hope to make verb generation cover even the these tiniest of steps to fully and completely generate verbs.

While not broad in its scope, our transducer is deep in what it does cover, providing the proof of concept for a fully expanded, in-depth Navajo transducer.

Links

link to transducer Our Navajo Main Page