A S outh S ámi Grammar Checker For Stopping Language Change (2023)

Abstract: We have released and evaluated the first South Sámi grammar checker GramDivvun. It corrects two frequent error types that are caused by and causing language change and a loss of the language’s morphological richness. These general error types comprise a number of errors regarding the adjective paradigm (confusion of attributive and predicative forms) and the negation paradigm. In addition, our work includes a classification of common error types regarding the adjective and negation paradigms and lead to extensive grammatical error mark-up of our gold corpus. We achieve precisions above 71% for both adjective and negation error correction.

## introduction language change is a natural process caused by various factors in all languages. indigenous languages are in a special situation, as they typically need to compete with a majority language, which is used by the bilingual language user more often and in more domains. south sámi is in a critical situation that requires concrete measures so that morphological richness is taught to the next generation and does not get lost. while we do not think we can stop language change altogether, we do think that we can provide necessary grammatical support for south sámi writers when other help is not available. a language community that wants to preserve certain language structures, will only be able to so if someone can give feedback to language learners, both l1 and l2. the school system does not provide sufficient language support for the south sámi language. students have only a few hours a week to learn the language. the teachers of south sámi have to select what they teach, which are typically the topics that are satisfactorily described in the grammar books, such as the verbal and nominal paradigms. other topics, such as the adjective and negation paradigms, on the other hand, are described very superficially and lack information about the variation in the spoken language. a grammar checker that corrects grammatical errors of the latter types can deliver feedback and thereby improve grammatical knowledge in these areas. in this article, we focus on two very frequent grammatical error types of morphological forms that the language community wishes to preserve, which has been expressed in professional meetings of teachers and translators. some of these tendencies have been decided on by the sámi normative institution. 1 those include adjective inflection and inflection of verbal periphrastic negation. an investigation in 2018 @xcite showed tendencies of adjective classes being reduced from four to two classes. @xcite cover negation in south sámi and shows that at least four nontraditional paradigms of past tense copula negation are used in contemporary text. there are strong tendencies in the language community itself to preserve the traditional paradigm as it is presented in the written grammar. @xcite the first south sámi gammar checker, gram-divvun, has been released 31st may 2023 and is freely available for ms word and googledocs. 2 we encourage the use of our proofing tools in schools and other educational institutions, publishing houses and the sámi government. ## evaluation the evaluation is based on a part of sikor, the south sámi corpus,(sik) containing administra-tive, law, religious, non-fiction, fiction, and science texts. the evaluation corpus is marked up for the following error types -spelling errors, morphosyntactic errors, syntactic errors, formatting errors, real word errors, etc. it consists of a publicly available corpus, freecorpus (34,512 words) and a part that is restricted by copyright bound-corpus (166,483 words). for evaluation purposes we use the marked-up parts of them, hence freecorpus and boundcorpus. the results of the evaluation are shown in adjective rules include both way confusions between attributive and predicative singular/plural form (@xmath1, @xmath2.pl) and @xmath3, a confusion between attributive forms and adverb derivations (@xmath4. negation rules include (tense and person) errors of the negation verb and errors of the connegative form. the latter can be finite forms or infinitives. errors can also be application of the main verb paradigm (connegative ending in -h) for the copula paradigm. while the main verb connegative form does not inflect for person and tense, the copula paradigm inflects for person and tense. precision for adjective and negation errors are both above 71%. recall is above 79%. we expect precision to raise to close to 90% after finetuning the rules and fixing the last issues of corpus mark-up. the corpus shows that both error types are frequent (188 and 68 errors respectively) and their correction is relevant for the language community. all rules have been released may 31st 2023 and are freely available for the south sámi language community. it needs to be marked-up for grammatical errors of the type we are investigating. previous versions did not include certain types of mark-up for the following reasons: 1) the norm had not beeb clear at that point of time. 2) manual mark-up is cumbersome, and not all error instances are easy to detect. when further investigating the reasons for the shortcomings of our tool we found the following: in ex. (8) attributive guelhties is erroneously corrected to predicative guelhtie. the reason for that is that rules are missing a condition for possible coordination. this can easily be specified and cor- 'it is not easy to pull a tin wire.' the previous example is a recurrent false positive type, just as in ex. (10), where predicative vihkele 'important' is erroneously corrected to attributive vihkeles since it is followed by a noun. however, this is an infinitive construction with an object before the infinitive just as in the previous example, and the predicative form of the adjective is correct. as there are many more negation error types, negation rule shortcomings are the following. one issue negation rules have not been paying attention to is the homonymy between finite and a connegative forms like lij 's/he was' in ex. (12), resulting in a false positive. gramdivvun tries to correct the form based on the assumption that it is a finite form. however, a negative condition excluding possible connegatives, should take care of this problem. ## conclusion in this article we present the first south sámi grammar checker for adjective and negation error correction, which are both very frequent error types in contemporary writing and speech. our evaluation on an error marked-up corpus confirms these tendencies. the loss of language arenas in a bilingual society and insufficient grammar teaching in schools have contributed to interference errors and a loss of morphological distinctions. one of the consequences is the use of a simplified adjective paradigm. the negation paradigm, on the other hand, displays a lot of variation in use, both regarding the negation verb and the connegative form. there are errors where the copula copies the main verb paradigm, others where the negation verb is used as an adverb, or agreement is neglected. the grammar checker tool plays an important role in language revitalization as wished by the language community, implementing normative decisions by means of much needed grammatical feedback. gramdivvun shows precisions above 71% for adjective and negation form correc-tion. gramdivvun for microsoft word and google docs has been released in may 2023 and is freely available for download. future plans include improvement of existing error type correction and correction of other frequent error types.