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# Testing and enhancement of language models
(transducers) from GiellaLT (Scientific blog)

Jack Rueter

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Jack Rueter. Testing and enhancement of language models (transducers) from GiellaLT (Scientific blog). 2024, 10.5281/zenodo.14356714. hal-04828974

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Testing and enhancement of language models (transducers) from GiellaLT
(Scientific blog)

Jack Rueter, University of Helsinki, Digital Humanities, first.last@helsinki.fi

GiellaLT<fnref n="1" /> provides an infrastructure for rule-based language technology aimed at minority and indigenous languages, and streamlines building anything from keyboards to speech technology. The web site of GiellaLT offers language models (transducers)<fnref n="2" /> for a wide range of languages. Writing documentation for each language repository is an ongoing effort, and part of the development process. The author has actively participated in the development of open-source, rule-based for a majority of these Uralic target languages.

## Analyzer enhancement

The GiellaLT infrastructure, with its implementation of finite-state tools, allows people working with different languages to make use of technological solutions that, otherwise, might require several years of individual development. It is here that descriptions for many of the Uralic languages have been initialized and developed as both financed projects and the work of language technology enthusiasts. The GiellaLT infrastructure makes it possible to reuse finite-state descriptions and even encourages it. Thus, contributing to the enhancement of the finite-state tools at GiellaLT, when extending the annotation of corpora on the Language Bank of Finland's Korp server, is beneficial to the search engine users as well.

On this page, we will evaluate the state of development of analyzers for individual languages in relation to text data being annotated for the Korp search engine. This evaluation will therefore be aligned with the annotation of upcoming corpora, such as a new extended version of Parallel Bible Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS) version 2³. The objective is to increase the lemmatization, morphological and syntactic annotation coverage not previously offered for non-majority languages in the parallel corpus. So, here we will provide an illustrative depiction of each, individual finite-state description. In the more developed descriptions, we will also show steps have been made for improvement. This might be seen as enhanced but not complete coverage of various genre as we go.

The evaluations will tend to illustrate the capacities of the analyzers, which do have equivalent generators, but the possible over-productivity of these generators is presently not the focus of these evaluations. In time, attention will be also drawn towards the description of the disambiguation of morphological analyses, which is made possible in the open-source GiellaLT infrastructure. The enhanced descriptions, housed in GiellaLT, will serve as a contribution by the Language Bank of Finland in the shared responsibilities towards improved coverage of lesser described languages and NLP addressing them. Thus, the resulting analysers will be available for building within the GiellaLT infrastructure or the UralicNLP python<fnref n="4" />, java<fnref n="5" /> and .net libraries available through Github or the Language Bank of Finland.

<footnote n="1">¹<https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="2">²<https://giellalt.github.io/LanguageModels.html></footnote>

<footnote n="3">³<http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023030902></footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴<https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵<https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>
For more details see the complete description on analyzer enhancement<fnref n="6" /> by Jack Rueter.

## Evaluations of analyzers for individual languages:

### * Eastern Mari (Meadow and Eastern Mari)<fnref n="7" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="8" /> contains finite-state source files for the Eastern Mari language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

## The Meadow Mari aka Eastern Mari language

The Mari literary languages are represented by a two-way split into the majority Eastern and Meadow Mari language, on the one hand, and the Hill Mari or Western Mari language, on the other. Thus, the term «Meadow Mari» is a translation of the endonym for the geographically central continuum of Mari adjacent to the «Hill Mari» in the west, and the term «Eastern Mari» is related to the geographically eastern continuum segment of majority Mari in the east. Hence, the terms «Meadow Mari» and «Eastern Mari», although indicating different parts of the Mari language continuum, are often used interchangeably, whereas the terms «Hill Mari» (endonym translation) and «Western Mari» are simply two names for the same language form. The split between Meadow & Eastern Mari versus Hill Mari is seen by some as a division in the continuum of a single language, despite the presence of lexical, vowel harmony and inflectional distinctions that might. Although the Meadow & Eastern Mari language shares many etymologically related words with Finnish and Hungarian, they are not obvious enough to recognize immediately, e.g., “kid” = “käsi”, “kéz” ‘hand; arm’; “vür” = “veri”, “vér” ‘blood’; “šinča” = “silmä”, “szem” ‘eye’.

Meadow Mari is used in regular issues of newspapers, journals, readers as well as radio and television programs. Mari underwent one great change in its orthography in the latter part of the 1930s. Until then, the principle had been one sound one letter. With the change, the Cyrillic spelling of Mari no longer gave non-speakers a clue as to the pronunciation of words, and the loanwords could readily be recognized as such. The stage was being set for further influx of internationalisms and Russian loans, but, even today, Mari words are actively used and created.

Only a few years after Kimmo Koskenniemi produced a finite-state description of the Finnish language in the early 1980s, Jorma Luutonen began work with a finite-state description of the Meadow Mari language. This work was recognized by Trond Trosterud, who initiated parallel work for Saami languages at Giellatekno in Tromsø, Norway. By the end of 1990s Trosterud was converting the original Latin-based code to UNICODE. In the beginning of the new Millennium, work with Meadow Mari was being conducted by yet a third programmer, Jeremy Bradley, in Vienna, Austria. In the second decade, Trosterud, Luutonen, Bradley joined together with Jack Rueter and prolific linguists Alexandra Simonenko and Anna Volkova to merge the finite-state descriptions developed in Turku, Tromsø and Vienna. Trosterud, Simonenko and Volkova worked specifically with the syntax and considered its portability to Hill Mari as well.

## The finite-state analyzer

<footnote n="6">⁶ This resource group page has a Persistent Identifier: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024050302 <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024050302></footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/eastern-mari/></footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-mhr></footnote>
The present analyzer for Meadow Mari is extremely extensive. There are 438 lexicons and approximately 156,490 lemma and stem pairs in the finite-state analyzer. Over 94,600 of the total come from a shared proper nouns file and 4,343 come from a list of Meadow Mari proper nouns. Additionally, there are approximately 25,881 common nouns, 10,305 adjectives, and 7,643 verbs. In Yoshkar-Ola, Andrei Chemyshev went to great lengths to ensure both extensive vocabularies and Mari-language data, which was used in development.

## Coverage for Meadow Mari in PaBiVUS

In anticipation of the forthcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2⁹), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in the New Testament (2007). The total number of words was approximately 127,460, with 15,250 unique forms. 472 unique forms were not recognized, and a total of 129 unique forms occurred more than once.

## Meadow Mari materials

New Testament 2007
total tokens: 150,503
total words: 127,640
total characters (from words): 127,640
unique words: 15,250
Beginning: (2024-08-20)
unique misses: 472
number of lines before hapax: 129
Lacking unambiguous PoS: 1023
Lacking unambiguous dependency: 28,558
Size of lexicon lexc: 156,490
Number of LEXICONs: 438

While evaluating the coverage, it was noted that the Biblical texts had a low coverage for associated proper nouns, but that, actually, many of the languages written in Cyrillic letters shared the same names in present or historical translations of the Bible. In the long run, this part of the vocabulary might be shared, but it would definitely entail extra work to curtail an overflow of names inflecting according to foreign name templates.

## Future work with the analyzers

Even though the analyzer recognized a high percentage of the text, there are still parts of the lexicon, inflection, naturally, syntax to deal with. We can look forward to yet a third version of PaBiVUS featuring the entire Bible in Meadow Mari, and this will mean the introduction of additional proper nouns, nominal inflection and some additional solutions to disambiguation and an enhanced understanding of variation in the ordering of the categories of number, case and possessive person – a feature previously addressed by Jorma Luutonen and still quite distinctive in the Mari languages. Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="10" /> and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="11" />, java¹² and .net libraries.

<footnote n="9">⁹ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>
* Erzya<fnref n="13" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="14" /> contains finite state source files for the Erzya language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

**The Erzya language**

Erzya belongs to the Mordvin branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Moksha language. Earlier the Mordvin languages were classified geographically as members of the Volga branch, which implied a closer relation to the Mari languages – Hill Mari and the larger Eastern and Meadow Mari. This classification, however, appears to be more a matter of proximity than generic relationship. Etymologically we can observe an abundance of cognates Erzya shares with the Finnic and Saamic languages, e.g., “ked” = “käsi” = “giehta” ‘hand; arm’; “veŕ” = “veri” = “varra” ‘blood’; “śelme” = “silmä” = “čalbmi” ‘eye’; “kuz” = “kuusi” = “guossa” ‘spruce’; “koto” = “kuusi” = “guhtta” ‘six’.

Erzya literature has many genres, which might be accessed through regular issues of some newspapers, journals and readers as well as radio and television news programs. Hence, the open-source, finite-state description of Erzya begun by Jack Rueter in the end of the 1990s with the help of Kimmo Koskenniemi has a relatively broad base. The lexicon draws on work by Mixail Mosin, Jaana Niemi, Alho Alhoniemi, Nina Agafonova, Kuz’ma Abramov, Raisa Buzakova, Martti Kahla and Evgenij Četvergov, to name but a few. All of the documentation was moved to the forerunner of the Giellalt infrastructure in about 2006. In 2020–2022, Jorma Luutonen, Sirkka Saarinen and the helpful people at the University of Turku provided ample opportunity to work with both lemmatization in 2020 and hands-on work in Constraint Grammar dependencies 2021–2022.

The Erzya-language materials upcoming in the next version of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2) represent a new genre for Erzya. It will include the New Testament published in 2006, some test translations from the 1990s, the Gospell of 1910 as well as Gospel texts from 1821, and more recent Old Testament books from the 2010s. Due to the two-hundred year range, some of the words will not be recognized, which might be the result of changes in orthography or lexicon.

**The finite-state analyzer**

The Erzya analyzer provides coverage for an extensive morphology in both verbs and nominals. There are approximately 1370 continuation lexica for 176,832 lemma-stem pairs. In addition to a shared set of proper nouns of over 94,000, the lexicon contains approximately 24,000 common nouns, 16,000 verbs and over 31,000 adjectives. The adjectives are exhibit an abundance of Russian cognates, which points to a marked effort to document these kinds of words – thanks to people such as Marina Fedina and Enye Lav, who initiated this kind of adjective collection in the 2010s. The size of the lexical network might, of course, be attributed to strategies of NP head ellipsis known as secondary declension, where modifiers take case, number and definite marking, on the one hand.

<footnote n="12">¹² <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/erzya/></footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-myv></footnote>
On the other, the number of continuation lexica might also be attributed to ongoing work in vowel-harmony validation, i.e., it is one thing to describe perfectly written word forms, but quite another to describe systematic misspellings as well. The coverage of the analyzer can be observed in Korp materials at the Language Bank of Finland, i.a. «UD v2.13¹⁵», «ERME v2¹⁶», «Uspenskij 4 battles<fnref n="17" />».

## Coverage for Erzya in PaBiVUS

In preparation for the upcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2¹⁸), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in books of the New Testament (NT) from different centuries in addition to some newer translation of books from the Old Testament. All in all, there was a total of 311,957 word forms – 35,077 unique tokens of which there were 4,535 unique missing word forms. There were 1093 missing unique forms that appeared more than once, 8,625 words were ambiguous for part-of-speech tagging, and 28,961 tokens had ambiguous dependency tagging.

## Erzya materials

New Testament 2006; Gospel of Matthew 1821; Gospels 1910; test translations Mark 1995, Luke 1996, Acts 1996, Matthew 1998, Psalms 2011, Ruth, Ecclesiasties 2020, Songs 2020, Jonah 2020.

total tokens: 397,941

total words: 311,957

total characters (from words): 3,981,520

unique tokens: 35,077

date of attestation 2024-05-04

unique misses = 4,535

number of lines before hapax: 1093

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 8,625

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 28,961

Size of lexicon lexc: 176,832

Number of LEXICONs: 1370

## Observations

In addition to missing proper nouns, a second reason for words not being recognized may be attributed to changes in orthography. First, there is the unstandardized spelling, which is rampant in 1821. In the translation of the Gospel in 1910, there is a standard slightly different from that of today but quite consistent with the orthographies of the early 1880s – fifty years previous to when a standard was developed in the Soviet Union.

Initial work with the non-standard Erzya from 1821 was begun by simply listing the unrecognized word forms. It soon became apparent that development of normalization practices would be more time-efficient. Peculiarities of text include but are not limited to the use of the hard sign «ь» word- finally, the soft sign «ь» after non-alveolar consonants, the use of «я» to indicate the /æ/ sound of Southeastern/Sura Dialect, which is cognate to the first-syllable vowels «i, e, y» of Finnish, «a» of

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024031207></footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023021601></footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023042426></footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>
North Saami and <ð> of Skolt Saami: /sæl/ Fin = syli, North Saami = salla, Skolt Saami = sõll 'fathom; embrace'.

With the progress of enhancement work, the number of missing analyses began to drop, but as noted above additional work will be done with normalization. Normalization will mean that word forms can be searched for in Korp using standard-language forms, but that the original texts will be available through data in the margin.

Ending: 2024-05-30
unique misses: 4060
number of lines before hapax: 826
Lacking unambiguous PoS: 6,620
Lacking unambiguous dependency: 27,161
Size of lexicon.lexc: 177,106
Number of LEXICONs: 1370

## Future work with the analyzers

Although the coverage of the analyzer has been improved, with only 826 non-hapax unique forms missing, there is still much more work to be done. There are still apparent issues to address in coverage for non-normative morphology. This is indicated by at least two figures. Unique word forms still lacking recognition number at 4060, that is a little over 1.3% of the total. In addition, there are 27,161 word forms, 9% of the total, which still lack any kind of dependency marking. Furthermore, the number of continuation lexicons at 1370, is nearly twice of that in Komi-Zyrian, so there may be reason to reduce the network by means of a restructuring of the analyzer. Thus, there are still points of development to work on. Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="19" /> and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="20" />, java<fnref n="21" /> and .net libraries.

### * Hill Mari (Western Mari)<fnref n="22" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="23" /> contains finite state source files for the Western Mari language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

### The Hill Mari language

Hill Mari aka Western Mari belongs to the Mari branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Meadow Mari aka Eastern Mari language<fnref n="24" />. Earlier the Mari languages, which are geographically adjacent to the Mordvin languages, were classified as members of the Volga branch of the Uralic languages. Nowadays, it seems, this classification only finds motivation in proximity, without generic foundation. Hill Mari shares many of the same cognates that Mordvin languages do: "kid" = Moksha "käd" = Finnish "käsi" 'hand; arm'; "vÿr" = Moksha "veŕ" = Finnish "veri" 'blood'; "vÿc" = Moksha "veťə" = Finnish "viisi" 'five'.

<footnote n="19">19 <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/hill-mari/></footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-mrj></footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/eastern-mari/></footnote>
The Hill Mari language was reborn and actively invigorated with rise of the Internet. This involved a notable translator and writer who lived in Estonia and Finland from the late 1980s to the mid 2010s, Valeri Alikow, as well as Julia Kuprina and young people living in the Mari Republic. Among others this means a good presence in Wikipedia and translations of a few prominent Finnish and Estonian authors but also children's books, more recently "The Little Prince".

Work with the open-source, finite-state description of Hill Mari, however, was only begun in 2012 by Julia Kuprina and Jack Rueter in the auspices of the “Kone Foundation Language Programme”. Kuprina contributed to the extension of lexical work by A. A. Savatkova and K.G. Yuadarov while actively working with Alikow. Rueter’s work was also highly influenced by Alikow. Only after two years of constructing the model was it compared to the separately developed Meadow Mari description. In the late 2010s, the Hill Mari analyzer was complemented with shared tools for both Mari literary languages implemented by Alexandra Simonenko, Anna Volkova, Jeremy Bradley, Jack Rueter and Trond Trosterud, and more vocabulary work for Meadow Mari to Hill Mari was contributed by Andrei Chemyshev.

The Hill Mari-language materials in the upcoming version of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2) represent a lesser documented genre of Hill Mari. The materials will include the New Testament published in 2014.

## The finite-state analyzer

The Hill Mari analyzer provides coverage for an extensive morphology in both verbs and nominals. There are approximately 543 continuation lexica for 173,284 lemma-stem pairs. In addition to a shared set of proper nouns of over 94,000, the lexicon contains approximately 55,000 more proper noun forms, 11,975 common nouns, 3,500 verbs and 5,472 adjectives. Due to what appears to be an irregular vowel shift, developing shared vocabularies for the Western and Eastern Mari languages is still a challenge. The coverage afforded by the analyzer can be observed in Korp materials at the Language Bank of Finland, i.a. «Uspenskij 4 battles<fnref n="25" />» as well as the forthcoming «Pavlik Morozov<fnref n="26" />» and «PaBiVUS v2²⁷».

## Coverage for Hill Mari in PaBiVUS

In preparation for the upcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in books of the New Testament. All in all, there was a total of 63,022 word forms – 6.906 unique tokens of which there were 5,066 unique missing word forms. There were 2,247 missing unique forms that appeared more than once, 19,119 words were ambiguous for part-of-speech tagging, and 19,119 tokens had ambiguous dependency tagging.

## Hill Mari materials

New Testament 2014

total words: 63,022

total characters (from words): 329,606

unique words: 6,906

<footnote n="25">²⁵ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023042426></footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023082102></footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>
date of attestation: (2024-09-01)

unique misses: 5,066

number of lines before hapax: 2,247

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 19,119

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 36,098

Size of lexicon lexc: 173,284

Number of LEXICONs: 543

## Observations and Future work

The Hill Mari description is wanting in lexicon and perhaps extensions to inflectional paradigms. The Lexicon, as can be discerned above, is lacking in a majority of unique word forms used in the Biblical genre. This includes proper names, on the one hand, but also a high number of direct loanwords, on the other. This kind of words had not been considered earlier in the documentation of Hill Mari. The relatively low number of verbs in the description, less than four thousand, would intuitively point to the need for further work in verbs as well.

Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="28" /> and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="29" />, java<fnref n="30" /> and .net libraries.

### * Karelian aka Dvina-Karelian<fnref n="31" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="32" /> contains finite state source files for the Karelian language, for building morphological analysers, proofing tools and dictionaries, including Verdd.

## The Karelian language

Karelian is a language form with three different literary norms. For some, these forms can readily be divided into Karelian Proper, on the one hand, and Olonets-Karelian, on the other. Karelian Proper can further be divided into Dvina-Karelian – one of the language forms published in the newspaper «Oma mua» – and Tver-Karelian, which was originally published in the Tver Oblast' – approximately half way between St Petersburg and Moscow. The further division of Karelian into smaller groups equates to localization addressing preferred word choice and morphology. All divisions of Karelian Proper, to some extent, improve and simultaneously hinder the development of a singular Karelian-language community. This article deals with the Dvina-Karelian variant of Karelian Proper, which can be found through Karelian and language contacts<fnref n="33" />, the ‘Karelian Union Library<fnref n="34" />’ as well as the VepKar corpora<fnref n="35" />. A wikipedia for Karelian<fnref n="36" /> is under construction and, in addition to the New Testament of 2011 in Dvina-Karelian a previous test version of the Gospel of Mark appeared in 1996.

<footnote n="28">²⁸ <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/karelian/></footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-krl></footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ <https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/group/karelian-and-language-contacts/></footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ <https://kirjasto.karjalanliitto.fi/FIN/search.htm></footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ <http://dictorpus.krc.karelia.ru/en/corpus/text></footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ <https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/krl/Pi%C3%A4%C5%A1ivu></footnote>
The finite-state description developed for the language in the GiellaLT infrastructure, was originally
developed by Flammie Pirinen – the author of the open-source morphological description of
Finnish, OMorFi. The objective of this undertaking was to facilitate machine translation between
the Karelian variants and Finnish. Dvina-Karelian reminds us of Olonets-Karelian, due to its
extensive slavic vocabulary and <ua>, <iä> diphthongs represented in literary Finnish as <aa> and <ää>,
respectively. Like Finnish and unlike Olonets-Karelian, however, Dvina-Karelian distinguishes
between the locative and departure cases. While Dvina-Karelian distinguishes the inessive in both
the adjective and the noun <šuurešša pereheššä> ‘in the big family’ from the elative <šuurešta
pereheštä> ‘from the big family’, Olonets-Karelian only makes this distinction for the head of the
noun phrase <suures perehes> ‘in the big family’ vs <suures perehespäi> ‘from the big family’.

Karelian materials

Dvina-Karelian (krl)
New Testament 2011
total tokens: 175,863
total words: 139,767
total characters (from words): 807,821
unique words: 16,940
Beginning: (2024-09-06)
unique misses: 13,643
number of lines before hapax: 6,163
Lacking unambiguous PoS: 15,234
Lacking unambiguous dependency: 16,652
Size of lexicon.lexc: 1,974
Number of LEXICONs: 651

In September of 2024, the model for Dvina-Karelian was minimal. It consisted of an initial size of 1,974 lexical items, i.e., of which 339 were nouns, 181 were verbs and 43 were adjectives. The low number of lexical items is actually much less than what can be observed as incoming lexica, namely, there is a large number of nouns (19,675), verbs (15,186) and adjectives (7,431) that simply have not been aligned with paradigms. This can be taken as preparation for analyzer development to be documented with upcoming corpus attestation. The Dvina-Karelian New Testament from 2011 will be annotated to the extent possible in the upcoming Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS version 2³⁷) through the Language Bank of Finland.

Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="38" />, Verdd, and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="39" />, java<fnref n="40" /> and .net libraries.

* Komi-Permyak<fnref n="41" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<sup>42</sup> contains finite-state source files for the Komi-Permyk language, for
building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

<footnote n="37">³⁷ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/komi-permyak/></footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-koi></footnote>
Komi-Permyak belongs to the Permian branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Komi-Zyrian and Udmurt languages, the former of which seems to be a northern cluster of a nearly comprehensible pluricentric Komi language. The two Komi language forms are close in many ways, sharing many of the same paradigmatic relations illustrating conjugation and declension alignment. A geopolitical divide, however, has long been established between the two language forms, and certain local particularities of the vernaculars have become well established – including the orthography.

The Komi-Permyak language has previously been well used in regular issues of newspapers, journals, readers, and this language awareness and usage is maintained to some extent on the Internet. In 2019, a complete translation of the New Testament was published — a continuation of translation efforts from the 1990s. The language underwent several changes in its orthographies in the early nineteen-hundreds – from Cyrillic to Latin-based 1932–1937 and then to a new Cyrillic-based orthography after the purges of 1937–1938. At present, there are still a few letters that cannot be represented in UNICODE, namely, the Latin letters <d>, <l>, 
 and <t> with descender. Hence, descriptive work of the 1932–1937 period requires a workaround with approximate characters.

## The finite-state description of Komi-Permyak

When Jack Rueter began work on the open-source, finite-state description of Komi-Permyak in 2016, he opted to utilize the striking similarities between the two Komi language forms. He found that by simply applying Permyak concatenative suffixes and suffixation to an otherwise Komi-Zyrian lexicon a lexicon size of 120,000 would provide a nearly 83% pseudo-coverage of for Komi-Permyak texts. "Pseudo-" or false positive readings, however, are not helpful in the description of a language, and so extensive morphological input made by PhD. Larisa Ponomareva (2018–2021) and lexical work by Enye Lav (2020–), both native speakers, have been of great importance to the present state of the analyzer.

The Komi-Permyak finite-state analyzer is supported by 579 lexicons and approximately 186,172 lemma-stem pairs. The actual size of the Komi lexicon can be arrived at by subtracting the mutually shared 94,663 proper nouns from the total, i.e., 91,509. Thus, the remaining Komi lexicon includes 20,501 verbs, 38,798 common nouns, 13,401 adjectives in the largests of its sublexica. The analyzer has been used in the development of the manually verified treebanks of the language found in the Universal Dependencies project, such as those found in the «UD v2.13<sup>43</sup>» corpora hosted on the Language Bank of Finland Korp server.

## Coverage for Komi-Permyak in PaBiVUS

In preparation for work with the Komi analyzer, a set of figures was compiled for evaluation purposes. It was noted that the New Testament and a previous version of the Gospel of Mark contained 174,642 tokens for a total of 15,642 unique tokens. When checking lemmatization, there were 818 unique forms missing from the analyzer, of 206 forms occurred more than once. Part-of-speech marking failed for 4,616 instances, which would indicate a need for further work in disambiguation. Finally, dependency tagging showed as many as 17,401 ambiguous tokens.

It was determined that a majority of the missing analyses was due to short comings in the lexicon and paradigms. This is rather straight forward, as the Biblical texts contain numerous proper nouns not present in other genres of Komi texts. Close scrutiny of the continuation lexica revealed that

<footnote n="43"><sup>43</sup> <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024031207></footnote>
some of the morphology had been directly copied from the Komi-Zyrian analyzer without making
corrections for distinguishing features, such as the voiced vs voiceless opposition in the morpheme-
final <d> of Komi-Zyrian and the morpheme-final <t> of Komi-Permyak.

During the enhancement phase, additions were subsequently made to the lexical entries and the network of continuation lexica was extended. At the end of this phase, the number of continuation lexica had raised from 579 to 594, and the number of lemma-stem pairs from approximately 186,172 to 186,741. The number of unique word forms missing from the analyzer had dropped to 359, with 74 unique forms occurring more than once. The number of ambiguous part-of-speech tags dropped to 4099, and the number of ambiguous dependencies dropped to 15,890.

Future work with the analyzers

Future work will take us beyond simple matters of vocabulary and basic paradigms. Specific work
will be needed for dealing with orthographic variation found in the translation, which are not
currently part of the spelling norm for the language. The 97% coverage for part-of-speech tagging
must be improved, with further analysis for detecting false positives in dependency tagging as well
where 91% of the tokens have a specified dependency. Extended work with parallel Permyak and
Zyrian Komi texts might also help to align improvements in both sets of analyzers.

The Komi-Permyak analyzer is being enhanced for better coverage in the upcoming publication of the new version of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS)<fnref n="44" /> through the Language Bank of Finland.

* Komi-Zyrian<fnref n="45" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="46" /> contains finite state source files for the Komi-Zyrian language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

The Komi-Zyrian language

Komi-Zyrian belongs to the Permian branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Komi-Permyak and Udmurt languages, the former of which seems to be a southern cluster of a nearly comprehensible pluricentric Komi language. Although the Komi language shares many etymologically related words with Finnish and Hungarian, they are not obvious enough to recognize immediately, e.g., “ki” = “käsi”, “kéz” ‘hand; arm’; “vir” = “veri”, “vér” ‘blood’; “śin” = “silmä”, “szem” ‘eye’.

Komi-Zyrian is the language used in regular issues of newspapers, journals, readers as well as radio and television programs. Here, we have a complete translation of the New Testament from the early part of this millennium. Despite numerous changes in its orthographies during the early part of the twentieth century, the (Zyrian) Komi language has established its own terminology in many fields, and its morphologically prolific character is well maintained. A finite-state description of the language was begun in the mid-1990s by Jack Rueter and much collaboration has been done with native speaker researchers as well as others.

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023030902></footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/komi-zyrian/></footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-kpv></footnote>
In 2004, an open-source description of about 6,000 lemmas entered what is today known as the
Giellalt infrastructure. Here, Komi-Zyrian served as an example of a highly inflectional non-Saami
language for the GiellaLT team, and it is also where the Komi specialist, Paula Kokkonen, did
Komi-Finnish dictionary work with funding from the Kone Foundation during the Kone Language
Programme. In more recent years, Niko Partanen, a doctoral student working with Komi dialects,
has made notable contributions to +Dialect lexicon as well.

## The finite-state analyzer

The present state of the analyzer is quite extensive. There are 681 lexicons and approximately
319,760 lemma and stem pairs in the finite-state analyzer. 94,663 of the total come from a shared
proper nouns file and 8,946 come from a list of Komi-Zyrian proper nouns. When examining the
breakdown of nearly infinite part-of-speech sets, we find a discrepancy in the ratio for nominals to
verbs. Where there are only 26,474 nouns and 20,815 adjectives in the rule-based description, there
is an exceptionally large number of verbs, over 163,533. This imbalance in the analyzer would seem
to be directly related to the incorporation of HunSpell data sets intended to provide extensive
coverage for the Komi verbal inflection system without derivation. In combination with the regular
derivation in the description, the finite-state analyzers have proven to supply relatively good
coverage for spellers and the analysis required by the Universal Dependencies, such as those found
in the «UD v2.13» hosted on the Language Bank of Finland Korp server.

## Coverage for Komi-Zyrian in PaBiVUS

In anticipation of the forthcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in the New Testament (NT), such that some books were represented by more than one version. The total number of tokens, i.e., words and punctuation marks were approximately 180,381, with 18,643 unique forms. 443 unique forms were not recognized, and a total of 89 unique forms occurred more than once.

## Komi-Zyrian materials

New Testament 2008, Gospels of Mark 1995, and John 1997

total tokens: 180,381

unique tokens: 18,643

Beginning time: (2024-04-15)

unique misses: 443

number of lines before hapax: 89

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 632

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 12,713

Ending time: 2024-04-18

unique misses: 210

number of lines before hapax: 25

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 310

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 12,448

Size of lexicon lexc: 319,760

Number of LEXICONs: 681
While evaluating the coverage, it was noted that the Biblical texts had a low coverage for associated proper nouns as well as pair-verb and collective-noun constructions. While reducing the missing unique forms from 443 to 234, Rueter performed special morphological work to allow for parallel inflection in nouns and verbs. This meant utilizing special features in the Helsinki Finite-State Transducers (HFST) which allow the alignment of morphology regardless of adjacency or number of iterations, e.g., “zon[jas]-nyv[jas]” approximately ‘boy[s]-n-girl[s]’ vs “boy-n-girl”. Naturally, in Komi-Zyrian, we would expect large paradigms where grammatical categories are marked in tandem. Rules in the two-level model were also corrected for more consistent coverage.

## Improvements included addition of missing words as well as paradigmatic enhancement

Missing words, sojtög-jutög ‘without eating or drinking’ <paradigmatic enhancement>, two-level rule work «пышъясны» ‘to escape’ extend context of present rule й:ъ Indication of transivity in pair verbs Verbal abessive is marked as a part of regular derivation “vermyny” ‘to win’ >> “vermytöm” ‘invincible’.

## Future work with the analyzers

Initial work with disambiguation revealed that, not all words with the nominal plural marker /jas/ are actually nouns. In fact, “mentioned” words and raised NP heads can also take nominal plural marking. Hence, the word /tadzi/ ‘in this way’ might also appear as a plural noun in text, as the English and Finnish conjunctions “buts” in “no buts about it” and “muttia” in “ei mitään muttia”. Raised NP heads, in contrast, show what might be done in cases of NP head ellipsis — the number and case categories are inherited directly from the elided noun. In Mordvin studies, this phenomenon is referred to as secondary declension. An English near equivalent might be seen the construction: “The King of England’s name is Charles III”, where the <’s> comes after the final element of the noun phrase instead of the noun possession is associated with. In Komi-Zyrian, the structure /as mu-yś-jas dor-as/ ‘own country-from-Plural near-at.theirs’ would translate to ‘At the [people] from one’s country’, where the word ‘people’ has been elided.

Although the coverage of the analyzer has been improved, with only 25 non-hapax unique forms missing, there is still much more work to be done. It seems, there are still issues to address in morpho-syntactic analysis. This is evidenced by at least two figures. Unique word forms still lacking recognition number at 310, that is a little over 1% of the total. In addition, there are 12,448 word forms, 7% of the total, which still lack any kind of dependency marking. Thus, there are still points of development to work on. Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="47" />, Verdd and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="48" />, java<fnref n="49" /> and .net libraries.

## * Moksha<fnref n="50" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="51" /> contains finite state source files for the Moksha language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/moksha/></footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-mdf></footnote>
## The Moksha language

Moksha belongs to the Mordvin branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Erzya language and especially the Shoksha language form, whose status as an individual language has been contested. Earlier the Mordvin languages, which are geographically adjacent to the Mari languages, were classified as members of the Volga branch of the Uralic languages. Nowadays, it seems, this classification only finds motivation in proximity, without generic foundation. Of the Mordvin languages, it is Moksha that shares Finnic *ä* – distinguishing it from *e* in words such as “käd” = “käsi” ‘hand; arm’; “keď” = “kesi” ‘skin’; “veŕ” = “veri” ‘blood’. Like Erzya, it also shares multiple cognates with Finnish and Saami “śeĺmə” = “silmä” = “čalbmi” ‘eye’; “kargə” = “kurki” = “guorgga” ‘crane’; “veťə” = “viisi” = “vihtta” ‘five’.

The Moksha language is actively used in many genres. In addition to regular issues of some newspapers, journals and readers it can also be found in radio and television news programs and on the Internet. Work with the open-source, finite-state description of Moksha, however, was only begun in 2012 by Merja Salo and Jack Rueter in the auspices of the “Kone Foundation Language Proprogramme”. While Salo contributed to the extension of lexical work by Aleksandr Feoktistov and Eeva Herrala, Osip Polâkov, Rueter strove to copy, where possible, the finite-state description already developed for Erzya. Copying the structure of an existing language model would make it easier for subsequent development in facilitation of the two languages – work with national corpora for the Mordvin languages, Universal Dependencies projects (see, for example, Uralic UD v2.13) and shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation in Apertium. In 2020–2022, Jorma Luutonen, Sirkka Saarinen and the helpful people at the University of Turku provided ample opportunity to work with both lemmatization in 2020 and hands-on work in Constraint Grammar dependencies 2021–2022 for both Moksha and Erzya.

The Moksha-language materials upcoming in the next version of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2) represent a lesser documented genre of Moksha. The materials will include the New Testament published in 2016 and a test translation from 1995. The Moksha translator, Valentina Mishanina, is a seasoned writer, and this is quite apparent in the vivid and diverse text.

## The finite-state analyzer

The Moksha analyzer provides coverage for an extensive morphology in both verbs and nominals. There are approximately 852 continuation lexica for 189,476 lemma-stem pairs. In addition to a shared set of proper nouns of over 94,000, the lexicon contains approximately 13,200 common nouns, 13,500 verbs and over 11,000 adjectives. As with any language, the noun, verb and adjective lists include loanwords of many varieties – some are written the same as they are in the majority language, while others have undergone varied degrees of integration into the Moksha language. As in Erzya, Zyrian Komi, Permyak Komi and Mansi, an effort is being made to document features of loanword integration into Moksha and at the same time indicate where native vocabulary already exists or is emerging. This documentation will be helpful in language identification and enhancement. The coverage of the analyzer can be observed in Korp materials at the Language Bank of Finland, i.a. «UD v2.13⁵²», «ERME v2⁵³», «Uspenskij 4 battles<fnref n="54" />», «PaBiVUS<fnref n="55" />».

## Coverage for Moksha in PaBiVUS

<footnote n="52">⁵² <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024031207></footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023021601></footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023042426></footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>
In preparation for the upcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in books of the New Testament (NT). All in all, there was a total of 166,243 word forms – 20,889 unique tokens of which there were 2,015 unique missing word forms. There were 366 missing unique forms that appeared more than once, 2,754 words were ambiguous for part-of-speech tagging, and 13,816 tokens had ambiguous dependency tagging.

## Moksha materials

New Testament 2016; Gospel of John 1901; Gospel of Mark 1995.

total tokens: 201,579

total words: 158,742

total characters (from words): 2,012,818

unique tokens: 20,853

date of attestaion 2024-07-24

unique misses = 2,032

number of lines before hapax: 366

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 2,754

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 13,816

Size of lexicon lexc: 189,476

Number of LEXICONs: 852

## Observations

The oldest version of the Gospel of John was written in a consistent orthography, which was readily
normalized to the modern standard language. The description of the modern language, it seems,
requires additional work in suffix and linking vowel variation. Linking vowel variation is present in
words with specific consonant clusters followed by a word-final schwa /ə/ written as <a> or <e>. In
nominals, the presence-absence alternation of a linking vowel before the plural marker or locative
cases (Illative, Inessive or Elative) may require additional statistical work for predicting which is
variant is more prominent.

New combinations have been discovered whose description may require renewed approaches to the
concept of mood in verbs. Moksha and Erzya are described as having a conditional mood that may
further combine with a conjunctional (aka subjunctional) mood. In the most recent translation of the
New Testament in Moksha, it should be noted, an additional combining conditional + optative form
has been found. This discovery may spark a renewed evaluation of the Mordvin Conditional, which,
in fact, is a protasis marker with an approximate meaning 'if' as discussed by Petar Kehayov.
Should the protasis marker be dealt with as derivational morphology?

## Future work with the analyzers

Although the Moksha analyzer now has better coverage than before, there is still work to be done in
the declension of noun modifiers in instances of ellipsis. Unlike German, Russian and Finnish,
Mokshen adjectives and numerals do not decline as noun modifiers. If the head noun is dropped,
however, the right-most premodifier in a noun phrase becomes the locus of case, number, possessor,
and definiteness marking. This phenomenon also affects nouns modifying nouns if they are in the
Genitive, Inessive, Elative and Abessive cases. This latter subgroup has often been dealt with
separately under the terminology «secondary declension». As in the most recent fieldwork-driven
article by Mariâ Privizentseva<fnref n="56" />, the description of noun modifier declension will treat adjectives, numerals and declined nouns as representative of one phenomenon.

* Northern Mansi<fnref n="57" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="58" /> contains finite state source files for the Mansi language, for building morphological analysers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

Mansi belongs to the Ob-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with Khanty and Hungarian, with whom it shares closer lexical, morphological and syntactic features than with the Balto-Finnic, Saami, Permian, Mari and Mordvin languages. Today, Northern Mansi is the only surviving Mansi language form of the numerous languages recorded by Hungarian, Finnish and other foreign scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are regular online newspaper publications «Luima Seripos» supplemented by occasional books, readers and here, a translation of the Gospel of Mark from the year 2000.

Northern Mansi has undergone a change in orthography since the beginning of this Millennium. Therefore, the finite-state description developed for the language in the GiellaLT infrastructure has focused on the language of the predominant news media. This has meant allowing a large variety of spelling to cover an alternation in vowel-length marking, on the one hand, and filtering to facilitate previous spelling principles present in publications only twenty-some years old.

Mansi (mns)
Test data
MRK 2000
total tokens: 13,426
unique tokens: 3,125
Beginning:
unique misses 908
number of lines before hapax: 195
Ending: (20240412)
unique misses: 615
number of lines before hapax: 73
Lacking unambiguous PoS: 778
Lacking unambiguous dependency: 5889

During a week-long period, in April of 2024, the model reached a size of 103,937 lexical items, i.e., 9,314 Mansi words and 94,623 proper nouns shared with other languages written in Cyrillics. The lemmatization was improved by adding about 100 new words to the lexicon and adding new vowel-length variants to verb paradigms in consultation with Csilla Horvát (a Mansi scholar at the University of Helsinki), Trond Trosterud (head of Giellatekno<fnref n="59" />) and Jack Rueter (Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki).

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/synt.12258></footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/mansi/></footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-mns></footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ <https://giellatekno.uit.no/index.eng.html></footnote>
The description of Mansi is an ongoing project, so these figures merely provide a snapshot for the spring of 2024 in relation to Biblical texts soon to be made available in a new release of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS)<fnref n="60" /> through the Language Bank of Finland.

* *Olonets-Karelian*<fnref n="61" /> *morphology and tools*

The GitHub repository<fnref n="62" /> contains finite state source files for the Olonets-Karelian language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

**The Olonets-Karelian language**

Olonets-Karelian aka Livvi belongs to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Veps and Ludic languages, on the one side, and Karelian proper, on the other. As a language form, Olonets-Karelian clearly shares morpho-syntactic features with Veps, e.g., its case marking often run elatives together with inessives, and ablatives together with adessives. “Suures mečäs” ’in a/ the big forest’ is contrasted with “Suures mečäspäi” ’from a/the big forest’ in Livvi, whereas Karelian Proper is very close to Finnish with “Suurešša mečäššä” ’in a/the big forest’ contrasted with “Suuresta mečästä” ’from a/the big forest’. The latter shows congruence in case marking, not present in some cases of Olonets-Karelian. From a phonological perspective, however, Olonets-Karelian shares the features of gradation as well as the dichotomies of vowel and consonant length and quality with Karelian Proper, Finnish and Estonian. Lexically, of course, Olonets-Karelian exhibits an abundance of Russian loanwords, as do the other minority languages of Karelia.

The Olonets Karelian language is actively used in news media in both Karelia and Finland. This includes issues of the Oma Mua newspaper in Karelia, and YLE Uudizet karjalakse ‘News in Karelian’ in text and podcasts on the Internet. Work with the open-source, finite-state description of Olonets-Karelian was only begun in 2012 by Timo Rantakaulio and Jack Rueter in the auspices of the “Kone Foundation Language Programme”. Here Rantakaulio contributed to both the extension of lexical work by various compilers, such as G. N. Makarov, Martti Penttonen, «Jougi», Jaan Õispuu, and the location of extensive paradigms for better understanding the inflection of verbs and nominals. On the basis of this preparatory work and in collaboration, Rueter designed an open-source analyzer, which addressed not only the preferred spelling of words but also some possible misspellings. In mid 2014, the collaboration with writers from the «Oma Mua» newspaper, provided evaluation of the finite-state description of the language, and invaluable advice on how to improve it.

In more recent years, work has been done with the lexicon to promote Pan-Karelian language use. The Olonets-Karelian analyzer lexicon has been used in the development of Karelian-Proper, Olonets-Karelian and Finnish translation machine development at Apertium (see GitHub apertium-krl-olo<fnref n="63" /> and GitHub apertium-fin-olo)<fnref n="64" /> in work with Timo Rantakaulio, Flammie Pirinen and Jack Rueter – Google Summer of Code 2021. Click-in-text dictionaries for Livvi are also available at Giellatekno<fnref n="65" />. The Olonets-Karelian-language materials upcoming in the next version of Parallel

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023030902></footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/olonets-karelian/></footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-olo></footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ <https://github.com/apertium/apertium-krl-olo></footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ <https://github.com/apertium/apertium-fin-olo></footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ <https://sanat.oahpa.no/olo/fin/></footnote>
Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2) represent a lesser documented genre of Livvi. The materials will include the New Testament published in 2003.

## The finite-state analyzer

The Olonets-Karelian analyzer provides coverage for an extensive morphology in both verbs and nominals.

There are approximately 1,591 continuation lexica for 63,079 lemma-stem pairs. This figure includes a set of proper names exceeding 32,100, approximately 13,200 common nouns, 4,500 verbs and over 3,000 adjectives. As in many other descriptions in the Giella infrastructure (e.g. Skolt Saami, North Saami and Inari Saami), compound word description allows for analysis at the individual constituent level. The coverage of the analyzer can be observed in Korp materials at the Language Bank of Finland, i.a. «UD v2.13<sup>66</sup>», «PaBiVUS<sup>67</sup>».

## Coverage for Olonets-Karelian in PaBiVUS

In preparation for the upcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in books of the New Testament (NT). The total of word forms in all was 134,493 — 15,959 unique tokens of which there were 3,359 unique missing word forms. There were 1,225 missing unique forms that appeared more than once, 2,727 words were ambiguous for part-of-speech tagging, and 6,010 tokens had ambiguous dependency tagging.

## Olonets-Karelian materials

### Olonets-Karelian (olo)

Test data

New Testament 2003:

total tokens: 168,235

total words: 134,493

total characters (from words): 931,383

unique tokens: 15,959

Beginning: (2024-08-14)

unique misses: 3359

number of lines before hapax: 1,225

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 2,727

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 6010

Size of lexicon lexc: 63,079

Number of LEXICONs: 1,591

## Future work with the analyzers

There are some shortcomings in lexicon and inflectional coverage of the analyzer. The texts of the New Testament contain numerous proper nouns not present in previous texts. Ordinal numeral description requires further documentation as does the general inflection of both nominals and verbs. The verb description needs work with passive forms as well as verbal adjectives and adverbs.

<footnote n="66"><sup>66</sup> <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024031207></footnote>

<footnote n="67"><sup>67</sup> <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>
Upcoming work with the coverage of the analyzer should include integrated work with use and development of the language in the New Media. This could, conceivably, be achieved through work with students of the language. Follow the development of the Olonets-Karelian analyzer on Giella<fnref n="68" />, UralicNLP<fnref n="69" /> and Verdd.

## * Udmurt<fnref n="70" /> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<fnref n="71" /> contains finite state source files for the Udmurt language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

### The Udmurt language

Udmurt belongs to the Permian branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest ties are with the Komi-Permyak and Komi-Zyrian languages, which, although viewed by some as mutually comprehensible, do not share this same intelligibility with Udmurt. Much like its Komi siblings, the Udmurt language shares many etymologically related words with Finnish and Hungarian, they are not obvious enough to recognize immediately, e.g., “ki” = “käsi”, “kéz” ‘hand; arm’; “vir” = “veri”, “vér” ‘blood’; “śin” = “silmä”, “szem” ‘eye’; “vu” = “vesi”, “víz” ‘water’.

Udmurt is the language used in regular issues of newspapers, journals, readers as well as radio and television broadcasts. Here, we have a complete translation of the New Testament from the end of the last century and the entire Bible from the second decade of this millennium. Unlike many Biblical text translations, the Udmurt New Testament and Bible represent the work of an individual native speaker and writer versed in linguistics, folklore and the Holy scriptures. The finite-state description of the language, however, was only begun in 2006 by Trond Trosterud and then continued in the next decade by Ryan Johnson and Jack Rueter with much collaboration from István Kozmács and numerous native speaker researchers as well as. Much needed help with the vocabulary in dictionary format has also come from Sirkka Saarinen and Sergei Maksimov.

### The finite-state analyzer

The present state of the analyzer is relatively extensive. There are 180 lexicons and approximately 196,925 lemma and stem pairs in the finite-state analyzer. 94,663 of the total come from a shared proper-nouns file which has also been enhanced using proper nouns from Udmurt texts. The ratio of nominals to verbs shows over 42,000 nouns, 12,900 adjectives and 12,300 verbs, which is in great contrast to what is found in the Komi-Zyrian analyzer. So far, the finite-state analyzers have been used in the annotation of the Uspenskij parallel texts<fnref n="72" /> hosted on the Language Bank of Finland Korp server.

### Coverage for Udmurt in PaBiVUS

In anticipation of the forthcoming publication of Parallel Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS v2), the analyzers were evaluated against the words and word forms in the New

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-olo></footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/udmurt/></footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-udm></footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023042426></footnote>
Testament (NT 1997) and Bible (2013), such that some books were represented by more than one version. The total number of tokens, i.e., words and punctuation marks were approximately 786,201, with 48,696 unique word forms. 13,196 unique forms were not recognized, and a total of 6,047 unique forms occurred more than once.

## Udmurt materials

New Testament 1997, Bible 2013
total tokens: 786,201
total words: 666,789
total characters (from words): 8,077,454
unique word forms: 48,696
Beginning: (2024-07-01)
unique misses 15902
number of lines before hapax: 7,535
Lacking unambiguous PoS: 80,637
Lacking unambiguous dependency: 202,272
Size of lexicon. lexc: 196,925
Number of LEXICONs: 180

## Future work with the analyzers

The finite-state description of Udmurt requires enhancements in many dimensions ranging from lexica to morphosyntax. While evaluating the coverage, it was noted that the Biblical texts had a low coverage for associated proper nouns as well as pair-verb and collective-noun constructions, as was the case in Komi-Zyrian. Lexical additions might be made utilizing word form documentation in a Hunspell data set obtained from Enye Lav, and work by Timothy Arkhangelsk. Follow our progress on GiellaLT<sup>73</sup>, Verdd and in the UralicNLP python<sup>74</sup>, java<sup>75</sup> and .net libraries.

### * Veps<sup>76</sup> morphology and tools

The GitHub repository<sup>77</sup> contains finite state source files for the Veps language, for building morphological analyzers, proofing tools and dictionaries.

## The Veps language

Veps belongs to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Uralic language family, and it has traditionally been spoken in regions of Karelia and the oblast's of Leningrad and Vologda. The Veps language has its closest ties with Ludic and Olonets-Karelian, which morpho-syntactically share some features such as case distinctions between expression of location versus departure, a passive conjugation, and an extensive infusion of Slavic vocabulary. While Veps has vowel harmony, like some other Uralic languages, it does not show indications of vowel quantity or consonant gradation, so common to other Balto-Finnic and even Saamic languages. Thus, the two-letter word «so» 'swamp' is a cognate

<footnote n="73"><sup>73</sup> <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="74"><sup>74</sup> <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="75"><sup>75</sup> <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>

<footnote n="76"><sup>76</sup> <https://www.kielipankki.fi/tools/giellalt_language_models/veps/></footnote>

<footnote n="77"><sup>77</sup> <https://github.com/giellalt/lang-vep></footnote>
of Finnish <suo> and Estonian <soo>, which share that same meaning. Regular publications of the Veps-language newspaper «Kodima»<fnref n="78" /> provide continuous use of the language, which is supplemented by a Wikipedia and occasional other publications, including the Gospels of Mark (1992), John (1993) and Mathew (1998).

Although, originally earmarked for development in a project finance through the Kone Foundation “Language Programme” (2013–2017), Veps was not included in the project 2013–2014. The language was seen as relatively simple morphologically and deemed to be an ideal object for teaching beginners in language technology. Presently, a Veps-Finnish dictionary is being developed by Heidi Niva (see researcher of the month<fnref n="79" /> and the «vajehnik-projekt» blog<fnref n="80" />) on a part-time basis on the dictionary editing platform Ve'rdd<fnref n="81" /> (Skolt Saami for 'flow' and also where the Finnish-Skolt Saami dictionary was edited for aligned development with linguistic tools in the GiellaLT infrastructure). Bringing Veps-Finnish dictionary development together with open-source language-technological documentation and development is proving beneficial for language facilitation.

## Veps materials

Veps (vep)

NT 2013

total words: 136,519

total characters (from words): 731,678

unique words: 14,610

Beginning: (2024-09-06)

unique misses: 8,439

number of lines before hapax: 3,919

Lacking unambiguous PoS: 13,181

Lacking unambiguous dependency: 18,531

Size of lexicon. lexc: 2,463

Number of LEXICONs: 377

In September of 2024, the model was quite small. It consisted of an initial size of 3,919 lexical items, i.e., of which 958 were nouns, 1232 were verbs and 137 were adjectives. Language tools for the Veps language are now under development. And Biblical Verses for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS-version 2⁸²), through the Language Bank of Finland, will feature an annotated version of the Veps New Testament from 2013.

Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="83" /> and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="84" />, java<fnref n="85" /> and .net libraries.

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ <https://omamedia.ru/fi/publication/kodima/> and <https://omamedia.ru/fi/publication/kodima/></footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ <https://www.kielipankki.fi/news/researcher-of-the-month-heidi-niva/></footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ <https://blogs.helsinki.fi/vajehnik-projekt/></footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ The Verdd dictionary editing platform used in editing the most recent Finnish-Skolt Saami dictionary <https://akusanat.com/verdd/></footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸² <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2024043001></footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>
Current state of Uralic transducers used in the annotation of the PaBiVUS version 2 corpora

The evaluation of finite-state transducers requires test corpora representative of the individual languages. One variety of test corpora has been found in the well curated Bible translations for many of the smaller Uralic languages, thanks to the Institute for Bible Translation in Helsinki<fnref n="86" />. We are looking forward to continued success in their translation endeavors and collaboration with them in the future. Hopefully, extensions in this genre can also find collaboration in the work of the ‘Finnish Bible Society’<fnref n="87" />. Other curated genres will prove vital for coverage of and more extensive evaluation in the future. The better the analyzer, the better the tools for language invigoration.

As of December 10, 2024, improvements have been made to the individual analyzers, lexica and shared proper nouns files have become more extensive. The most pronounced upgrade of transducers can be attributed to the Veps-language analyzer. Whereas, previously, there were over 8,000 wordforms not recognized, this number has been reduced to approximately 2,500 through corrections to the paradigmatic descriptions and word lists. The shared proper nouns file directed at Uralic languages written in Cyrillic script has jumped in size from approximately 94,000 to over 145,000. This dramatic leap can be attributed to the addition of place names of the Russian Federation<fnref n="88" /> and over 1,000 Pokémon names from Bulbapedia<fnref n="89" />.

Some of the Uralic minority languages were overlooked in this evaluation. First, majority languages with their own state were not included in the evaluation. Second, only languages with a subcorpus to be published in Parallel Bible Corpora for Uralic Studies (PaBiVUS) version 2⁹⁰ were evaluated, and finally the languages with minimal appropriate descriptions, such as the pluricentric language Khanty were not discussed. Thus, there are enhancements to be made at many levels, and they will, in turn, be evaluated at a later point in time when Saamic, Samoyedic and additional Balto-Finnic languages are incorporated into the PaBiVUS collection.

During the evaluation period, it has become apparent that the dictionary component utilized in the lexica for the transducer at GiellaLT might also be made available for other open-source development. To this end, the “Verdd” dictionary editing platform<fnref n="91" /> has been enhanced to allow not only for comma-separated-value (csv) and lexc (vital for analyzers) downloads, but to also provide bilingual downloads in various formats. These formats include XML download for the GiellaLT click-in-text dictionaries, Bidix download for Apertium<fnref n="92" />, the open-source shallow-transfer machine translation platform, and pivot translation predictions for language pairs from RootRoo<fnref n="93" />.

Follow our progress on GiellaLT<fnref n="94" />, Verdd and in the UralicNLP python<fnref n="95" />, java<fnref n="96" /> and .net libraries.

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Institute for Bible Translation in Finland https://www.rki.fi/</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ The [Suomen Pipliaseura] works with translation of the Bible, this includes work with the Saami and Karelian lanugages. https://www piplia.fi/mita-teemme/muutosvoimana-oma-kieli/raamattu-vahemmistokielille/</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ lists of regions, cities, and towns in Russia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cities_in_Russia</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ names of Pokémon creatures in Russian, most of which are transcriptions of the English version: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ <http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2023030902></footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ A multilingual database with development and download possibilities for work with GiellaLT and Apertium shallow-transfer machine translation <https://akusanat.com/verdd></footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² <https://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page></footnote>

<footnote n="93">⁹³ <https://rootroo.com/en/></footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ <https://giellalt.github.io/></footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP></footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ <https://github.com/mikahama/uralicNLP-Java></footnote>