An Expanded Finite-State Transducer for Tsuut’ina Verbs

Joshua Holden, Christopher Cox, Antti Arppe


Abstract
This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb system of Tsuut’ina (ISO 639-3: srs), a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alberta, Canada. Dene languages have unique templatic morphology, in which lexical, inflectional and derivational tiers are interlaced. Drawing on data from close to 9,000 verbal forms, the expanded model can handle a great range of common and rare argument structure types, including ditransitive and uniquely Dene object experiencer verbs. While challenges of speed remain, this expansion shows the ability of FST modelling to handle morphology of this type, and the expnded FST shows great promise for community language applications such as a morphologically informed online dictionary and word predictor, and for further FST development. This paper describes the expansion of a finite state transducer (FST) for the transitive verb system of Tsuut’ina (ISO 639-3: srs), a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alberta, Canada. Dene languages have unique templatic morphology, in which lexical, inflectional and derivational tiers are interlaced. Drawing on data from over 12,000 verbs forms, the expanded model can handle a great range of common and rare argument structure types, including ditransitive and uniquely Dene object experiencer verbs. While challenges of speed remain, this expansion shows the ability of FST modelling to handle morphology of this type, and the expnded FST shows great promise for community language applications such as a morphologically informed online dictionary and word predictor, and for further FST development.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.551
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5143–5152
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.551
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joshua Holden, Christopher Cox, and Antti Arppe. 2022. An Expanded Finite-State Transducer for Tsuut’ina Verbs. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5143–5152, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
An Expanded Finite-State Transducer for Tsuut’ina Verbs (Holden et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.551.pdf