A biscriptual morphological transducer for Crimean Tatar

P. 74–80.

Tyers F. M., Washington J., Kavitskaya D., Gökırmak M., Berberova R.

This paper describes a weighted finite-state
morphological transducer for Crimean Tatar
able to analyse and generate in both Latin and
Cyrillic orthographies. This transducer was developed
by a team including a community member
and language expert, a field linguist who
works with the community, a Turkologist with
computational linguistics expertise, and an experienced
computational linguist with Turkic
expertise.
Dealing with two orthographic systems in the
same transducer is challenging as they employ
different strategies to deal with the spelling of
loan words and encode the full range of the language’s
phonemes and their interaction. We develop
the core transducer using the Latin orthography
and then design a separate transliteration
transducer to map the surface forms to
Cyrillic. To help control the non-determinism
in the orthographic mapping, we use weights to
prioritise forms seen in the corpus. We perform
an evaluation of all components of the system,
finding an accuracy above 90% for morphological
analysis and near 90% for orthographic conversion.
This comprises the state of the art for
Crimean Tatar morphological modelling, and,
to our knowledge, is the first biscriptual single
morphological transducer for any language.

Keywords: orthography, finite-state morphology, Crimean Tatar

In book

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages Volume 1 (Papers)

Honolulu: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019.