On E rzya and M oksha Corpora and Analyzer Development, ERME - PSLA 1950s (2024)

Abstract: This paper describes materials and annotation facilitation pertinent to the «Erzya-Moksha Electronic Resources and Linguistic Diversity» (EMERALD) project. It addresses work following the construction of finite-state analyzers for the Mordvin languages, the gathering of test corpora, and the development of metadata strategies for descriptive research. In this paper, we provide three descriptors for a set of new Erzya and Moksha research materials at the Language Bank of Finland. The descriptors illustrate (1) a low-annotation subcorpora set of the «Electronic Resources for Moksha and Erzya» (ERME); (2) the state of the open-source analyzers used in their automatic annotation, and (3) the development of metadata documentation for the «EMERALD» project, associated with this endeavor. Outcomes of the article include an introduction to new research materials, an illustration of the state of the Mordvin annotation pipeline, and perspectives for the further enhancement of the annotation pipeline.

## introduction the mordvin languages, erzya and moksha, are spoken in settlements scattered throughout the volga basin (see @xcite , but there have been settlements beyond that as well (see @xcite . work with the description of these languages dates from the late 1600s in the form of word lists witsen 1705, but it was not until the end of the 1830s that the first attempts at grammars were made for moksha ornatov 1838 and erzya gabelentz 1838-1839. the erzya grammar by herr conon von der gabelentz is a striking study in that it illustrates the author's meticulous parallel-corpustype knowledge of the biblical texts. with this knowledge, hhe was able to identify irregularities in the text and draws relatively accurate conclusions with regard to the meaning of morphological items 1 . the text of the erzya gospel is partially available now in the «parallel bible verses for uralic studies» (pabivus) corpus version 1 (see helsingin yliopisto, @xcite , but the next version of pabivus will see the entire new testament in erzya from 1827, which can be aligned with translations into several other minority uralic languages. in this paper, we describe a new portion of the electronic resources moksha-erzya (erme) and its annotation, which is soon to be introduced on the language bank of finland korp server. the original intent of the erme corpora was to provide the language community and researchers with citeable materials that distinguish writers and other language sources both geographically and in temporal space. this meant the establishment of metadata features to served the purposes of the «emer-ald» project: provide parallel, consistent metadata for (1) fieldwork and early literary texts (felt), with a focus on language materials collected in the pre-soviet era, such as the mordvin fieldwork collections by heikki paasonen and others (cf. finno-ugrian-society, suihkonen 2003); (2) non-central publications in the minority languages of the soviet union between the two world wars 2 , and (3) work with modern collection of the mordvin language. the metadata was seen as a means to align research and fieldwork documentation of the languages with texts from an era of language popularization, subsequent fieldwork conducted with these languages and their modern state. thus, the metadata was organized to describe materials from the heikki paasonen collections of folklore, the fenno-ugrica collections at the national library of finland, the mormula corpora in turku, the dialect archives at the mordovian state university in saransk (see @xcite @xcite , and the erme corpora at the language bank of finland. this work was conducted in turku, @xcite in close association with corpora lemmatization, constraint grammar development and testing in turku, dialect archive development in saransk, and subsequent work with corpora in helsinki. in addition to metadata strategies for research citation, the annotation of the erme corpora can be described as a combination of work with optical character recognition (ocr) and the development of finite-state descriptions for the morphology and syntax of the languages. over the years, attempts have been made to bring these two more tasks closer together. in the 1990s, ocr meant accurate recognition of individual characters. since then attempts have been made to include finite-state work in ocr with hopes of word form recognition silfverberg and rueter 2015 for improved accuracy. simple examples of finite-state approaches also include plain word lists or regular expressions used to represent numerous uralic languages in ocr work in pilot projects conducted at the national library of finland foot_2 . subsequent work with mordvin lexica, morphology and syntax have played a major role in finding a purpose and collaboration beyond these languages. work in lexica has meant collaboration in erzya and moksha with northeuralex together with mordovian state university staff foot_3 , but it has also meant the development of dictionary editing (see @xcite and the enhancement of these dictionaries (see @xcite . work with morpho-syntax, in turn, has opened connections to collaboration with specialist in the komi languages in syktyvkar (see @xcite ) and the universal dependencies project with contributions to languages beyond erzya and moksha @xcite . all of these together have contributed to utilizing the giellatekno/divvun foot_4 infrastructure giel-lalt (an infrastructure for saami language-technology research and facilitation) and the open-source, shallow-transfer machine translation infrastructure apertium foot_5 . the apertium concept of shallow transfer makes it possible to draw parallels between lexicon, morphology, syntax and phraseology for the inspection of language diversity among closely related languages (see @xcite . it also allows for a better comparison of closely related languages in linguistic research (cf @xcite ). the article proceeds by discussing the materials, metadata and methods, the state of the individual analyzers and prospects for future development. ## materials and methods despite a history of over 200 years of published texts in erzya and moksha, there is a dearth of searchable mordvin text corpora consistently annotated for morphology, metadata and openly accessible. for this reason the erzya-moksha electronic resources and language diversity (emerald) project continues to augment metadata enriched materials available to the research communities @xcite . the electronic resources for moksha-erzya (erme) corpora versions one and two have been made available through fin-clarin on the language bank of finland korp server since 2017. the first version of erme focused merely on providing necessary metadata to facilitate a better alignment of text and authors, such that time-line and geographical plotting could languages/mdf be made consistent with analogous information available for erzya-language fieldwork. in the second version of erme, however, the materials were extended to include both mordvin literary languages -erzya and moksha -with metadata for individual publications, and automatic annotation made possible with finitestate analyzers for the two languages. morpho-syntactic annotation has been accomplished using finite-state transducers describing the two languages @xcite . these, in turn, have been followed in the same pipeline by constraint grammar (cg) disambiguation, functions and dependencies tools foot_6 . the coding is open-source and facilitated in the giellalt foot_7 infrastructure (cf. @xcite where the erzya and moksha languages share the progress in mutually applicable code that serves over 90 languages. at giellalt, the code is reused whereever possible, i.e., analyzer code is flipped to make compatible generators, pedagogic descriptions are filtered to provide standard and descriptive models of the language for linguists, while normed filtering provides for spellers. ## fst models the finite-state description of the two mordvin literary languages started nearly fifteen years apart. work on the erzya analyzer was begun in the late 1990s, whereas work on moksha was part of the «creation of morphological parsers for minority finno-ugrian languages» project funded by the kone foundation «language programme», @xcite @xcite . despite attempts to make the descriptions as parallel as possible, there are still statistical differences in their coverage and accuracy afforded by the erzya and moksha analyzers. both analyzers are used in the analysis of corpora texts on different platforms and projects foot_10 , system-wide spell checkers foot_11 . their development is part of a collaboration with the «experimental treebanking for the minority moksha language and finite-state descriptions» and «experimental treebanking for the minority erzya language and finite-state descriptions» projects. the analyzers have been used in the annotation of treebanks on the korp servers of both the language bank of finland foot_12 in helsinki, finland, and giellatekno/divvun foot_13 in tromsoe, norway. evaluation and enhancement of these analyzers is important for improving community language facilitation. brief statistical descriptions of the erzya and moksha analyzers have been given online through the language bank of finland foot_14 . these provide annotational statistics based on materials of the upcoming version of pabivus. below we offer an enhanced evaluation of the pabivus annotation for comparison with figures for the outcome of the erme-psla 1950s corpora. while notions of size are imme-diately obvious from the statistics, one must also bear in mind the cleanliness of the corpora. as noted above, in materials, erme-psla 1950s materials are likely to have ocr errors, this might be observed in the a comparison of unique forms to unique misses in the modern new testament texts and the erme-psla materials. ## discussion and conclusions the statistics for the erzya and moksha analyzers were drafted before the present article was begun. during the course of writing the article, a number of problems were noted with regard to the cg-to-ud-format transfer and the quality of the ocr. it was decided that enhancement and evaluation ought to be included in the release protocol of each new korpus for either of the languages. in a brief inspection of the erme-psla ocr quality, a lists of erzya and moksha words four letters or less in length were extracted from new testament texts. these words had been human inspected and digitally transferred, which would guarantee their quality. in the future, however, is was decided that separate lists of this kind should be drafted and curated to be used in inspection of text validity. finally, more work should be allotted to the development of function and dependency parsing, as these along with conversion strategies would immensely improve the usability of erme corpora. that we are not conducting our research with no regard to the language community.