Combining Concepts and Their Translations from Structured Dictionaries of Uralic Minority Languages

Combining Concepts and Their Translations from Structured Dictionaries of Uralic Minority Languages Mika Hämäläinen, Liisa Lotta Tarvainen, Jack Rueter Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki Fabianinkatu 33, 00014 University of Helsinki mika.hamalainen@helsinki.fi, liisa.l.tarvainen@helsinki.fi, jack.rueter@helsinki.fi Abstract Building language resources for endangered languages, especially in the case of dictionaries, requires a substantial amount of manual work. This, however, is a time-consuming undertaking, and it is also why we propose an automated method for expanding the knowledge in the existing dictionaries. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically combine conceptually divided translations from multilingual dictionaries for small Uralic languages. This is done for the noun dictionaries of Skolt Sami, Erzya, Moksha and Komi- Zyrian in such a way that the combined translations are included in the dictionaries of each language and then evaluated by professional linguists fluent in these languages. Inclusion of the method as a part of the new crowdsourced MediaWiki based pipeline for editing the dictionaries is discussed. The method can be used there not only to expand the existing dictionaries but also to provide the editors with translations when they are adding a new lexical entry to the system. Keywords: combining dictionaries, low-resource languages, semantic dictionaries 1. Introduction Words in a language are often considered to be the basic units of a dictionary. Like the language itself, dictionaries also contain elements specific to many different fields. Languages contain words composed of different phonemes, morphemes and syntactic structures. One can use a language by merely employing nothing but words. To understand a language fully, however, one also needs to understand the culture. A word is defined in the Concise Oxford English dictionary first as "[a] single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used to form sentences with others". Dictionaries contain words which are referred to as lexemes, lexical items, head words or lemmas in order to specify their specific use in dictionaries and to distinguish them from their use in the spoken language. In general, the head word of a dictionary entry is given as nominative singular for adjectives and nouns, while infinitive (or third person singular) forms are used for verbs cf. (Kastovsky, 1992). Depending on the language, a dictionary provides different inflectional forms essential to the language, and examples to illustrate usage. The problem many minority languages are facing is that their language resources are very limited. Small Uralic languages, which are the focus group of this paper, are no exception to this rule. Having good language resources in the form of a dictionary would benefit these languages, because they can be used in various tasks such as machine translation (Brown, 1997) and pedagogy (Antonsen; Huhmarniemi & Trosterud, 2009) when teaching the language to non-native speakers. Thus, their impact on the revitalization of endangered languages would be high. Furthermore, the building of a multi-language dictionary of this variety is essential for supporting minority languages. Due to the pressure of major languages, the amount of speakers of these minority languages has diminished radically. A multi-lingual dictionary …

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