# Enhancing Endangered Language FSTs with Pokémon Names

Jack Rueter, Mika Hämäläinen

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Jack Rueter, Mika Hämäläinen. Enhancing Endangered Language FSTs with Pokémon Names. Lightning Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages, Nov 2024, Helsinki, Finland. pp.1-5. hal-04800893

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Submitted on 24 Nov 2024

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# Enhancing Endangered Language FSTs with Pokémon Names

Jack Rueter¹ and Mika Hämäläinen²

¹University of Helsinki, Finland

²Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, Finland

## Introduction

Pokémon have, for a long time, been an object of scientific research (Jordan, 2004; Salter et al., 2019; Hämäläinen et al., 2021). As the world's highest grossing media franchise, it is evident why Pokémon has also gained popularity in the research community. Because Pokémon is such an international phenomenon, it is important that Pokémon names are included in NLP tools developed for endangered languages as well. This helps in ensuring that these tools cater for the needs of a wider audience of people.

The use of finite-state transducers (FSTs) in the development of language technology for Uralic languages has played a crucial role in handling morphological complexity (see Moshagen et al., 2014). Uralic languages, which include Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic branches, are known for their rich inflectional and derivational morphology. This makes FSTs an ideal choice for modeling these languages, as they can efficiently represent the various morphological processes such as case inflection, conjugation, compounding and derivation.
There are documentation projects for over ninety languages on the GiellaLT infrastructure (Moshagen et al., 2014). Over a dozen of these are languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet with or without extensions. For languages spoken in the Russian Federation, there is a large number of shared proper nouns which appear in printed media. Instead of collecting proper nouns shared by numerous languages, a shared lexicon has been developed that contains over 145,000 proper names. The proper name continuation lexica are indicated but can be modified at the individual language level. These shared lexica are in use in FSTs for Komi-Zyrian (Rueter et al., 2021), Komi-Permyak (Rueter et al., 2020a) Erzya and Moksha (Rueter et al., 2020b) among others.

## Pokémon as proper nouns

In general, names for humans have been tagged as surnames, given names or patronymics. Due to the presence of gender in Russian grammar, gender has also been indicated in some instances. By leveraging a shared lexicon, the FSTs can provide more accurate analysis and generation of proper names across multiple languages, while still allowing for language-specific adaptations. This approach also facilitates the automatic updating of the FSTs when new proper names are added to the shared lexicon.
Pokémon names, however, present their own issues. Some, like *Mr. Mime* and *Jynx*, can be labeled for gender, while others might represent both masculine and feminine beings. In addition, many Pokémon such as legendary and mythical ones, lack gender altogether so this group is not subjected to this binary split. When the Russian Pokémon names were introduced there were approximately 1021 of them covering all Pokémon from Kanto all the way to Paldea region. These Russian names were obtained from Bulbapedia<fnref n="1" />.

Two names proved to be problematic due to their use of Western Arabic numerals word-finally or mixed-range spelling. The names in question were *Поригон-2* and *Поригон-Z*. Names with special characters were equally problematic such as *Нидоран♂* and *Нидоран♀*. Names consisting of two words were split into different lemmas given that FSTs operate on a word level. Most of these Pokémon belong to the category of paradox Pokémon, such as *Великий Бивень* (Great Tusk) and *Волнистая Грива* (Flutter Mane). These names were also problematic because they were translated into Russian – all other Pokémon names are the same as in English but just transliterated into Cyrillic.

## Conclusions

In this study, we showed how adding Pokémon names to finite-state transducers (FSTs)<fnref n="2" /> can make language tools for endangered Uralic languages more useful and engaging. We ran into some interesting challenges along the way. Things like Pokémon names that don't fit neatly into gender categories, names with special characters, and mixed numbers and letters.

<footnote n="1">¹ https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Russian_Pok%C3%A9mon_names</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² https://github.com/giellalt/shared-uri-Cyrl/commit/99962216eb144395458831361cb81db5009c9b08</footnote>
By building a shared lexicon with Pokémon names, we managed to give FSTs a boost in recognizing and processing proper nouns across different languages. This setup also makes it easy to update the tools whenever new names are added, which keeps them relevant without needing a full overhaul. Ultimately, adding culturally relevant names like these not only enriches the language tools but also keeps them engaging and accessible, especially for people who might not otherwise connect with endangered language resources.

## References

Hämäläinen, M., Alnajjar, K., & Partanen, N. (2021). How Cute is Pokémon? Gathering and Ranking Pokémon Properties from Data with Pokémon Word Embeddings. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.09546.

Jordan, T. (2004). The pleasures and pains ofEMENT. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(4), 461-480.

Moshagen, S., Rueter, J., Pirinen, T., Trosterud, T., & Tyers, F. M. (2014). Open-source infrastructures for collaborative work on under-resourced languages. Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages in the Linked Open Data Era, 71-77.

Rueter, J., Partanen, N., & Ponomareva, L. (2020a). On the questions in developing computational infrastructure for Komi-Permyak. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Linguistics of Uralic Languages (pp. 15-25).
Rueter, J., Hämäläinen, M., & Partanen, N. (2020b). Open-source morphology for endangered Mordvinic languages. In Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (pp. 94-100). The Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rueter, J., Partanen, N., Hämäläinen, M., & Trosterud, T. (2021). Overview of open-source morphology development for the Komi-Zyrian language: Past and future. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computational Linguistics of Uralic Languages (pp. 29-39).

Salter, A., Stanfill, M., & Sullivan, A. (2019). But does pikachu love you? reproductive labor in casual and hardcore games. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-10).