Towards standardized inflected lexicons for the Finnic languages (2024)

Abstract: We introduce three richly annotated lexicons of nouns for Livonian, standard Finnish and Livvi Karelian. Our datasets are distributed in the machine-readable Paralex standard, which consists of linked CSV tables described in a JSON metadata file. We built on the morphological dictionary of Livonian, the VepKar database and the Omorfi software to provide inflected forms. All noun forms were transcribed with grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules and the paradigms annotated for both overabundance and defectivity. The resulting datasets are usable for quantitative studies of morphological systems and for qualitative investigations. They are linked to the original resources and can be easily updated.

## introduction several projects strive to provide good coverage of the numerous finnic languages. recently, lexicons following the unimorph format have flourished: finnish @xcite ; estonian and northern sami @xcite ; livvi, livonian and several other @xcite ; võro @xcite . despite its increasing size, @xcite have shown the pit-falls of unimorph when it comes to linguistically informed studies of morphological variation. semantic information, inflectional classes or frequencies are hard to extract and wordforms are provided in orthographical representations. the giellalt infrastructure @xcite also provides acccess to dozens of morphological rulebased parsers. however, they are intended to enhance language-learning tools and they are not meant for morphological investigation either. on the other hand, scholars and language institutes have developed their own resources, providing both inflected forms and rich annotation. such resources are invaluable, but there is few of them. as a result of their dispersal, they are provided in different formats and through idiosyncratic infrastructures which make them less accessible for large scale comparative studies. still, efforts for interoperability exist: in unimorph 3.0, resources for karelian languages are directly extracted from the vepkar database @xcite , although a lot of information is lost in the conversion, due to the limits of the unimorph format. our lexicons in phonemic transcription are designed to fill this gap. we selected valuable, wellcurated and rich resources for three uralic languages from the finnic group with very different backgrounds. standard finnish is the national language of finland, spoken by around five million people in finland. 1 livvi karelian is a southern karelian language spoken by 25,000 individuals in russia, near lake ladoga. courland livonian is a minority language spoken until the end of the 20th century on the coast of courland. although our pipeline can in theory be extended to verbs, this release only covers nouns. as our main contribution, we enriched the datasets with phonemic transcriptions and linguistic annotations. dataset iso licence doi cells lexemes forms paraliv 1.0 liv cc by-sa 4.0 10.5281/zenodo.11391421 16 6,769 110,449 parakar 1.0 olo cc by-sa 4.0 10.5281/zenodo.13736171 33 4,975 196,555 parafin 1.0 fin gnu gpl v3 10.5281/zenodo.13736132 151 5,000 879,117 paralex datasets are intended for morphologists. as such, they offer two crucial improvements over other formats: phonemic representations and rich annotations. since orthographic representations of words often obfuscate crucial features, the inflected forms are provided both in orthographic and phonemic writing. the phonemic transcriptions are checked on development sets to avoid regressions and cover most of the morphologically meaningful contrasts. allophony is left out when it doesn't affect morphology. paralex takes into account morphological diversity and has built-in methods to tag variants or defectivity (see below). our datasets follow these principles. they are made available on zenodo under the names parakar, parafin and paraliv (see ## conclusion we introduced inflected lexicons for three finnic languages: livonian, finnish and livvi. we reviewed current practices in uralic language resources and emphasized the importance of rich, machine-readable formats to facilitate crosslinguistic studies of morphological systems. we presented the design choices for our datasets and introduced our linguistically motivated graphemeto-phoneme rules. we outlined the annotations that we performed. appendix a showcases the main tables of one of the resulting datasets. although we did our best to manually check the transcriptions by evaluating random samples of forms and by carrying out targeted verifications, it is very likely that some mistakes remain, especially for loanwords. in addition to improved transcriptions, further versions should include more morphological annotations (e.g. information on stem gradation according to traditional descriptions) and reference other sources of frequencies (especially for finnish). the datasets could also be extended to verbal inflection.