Dmitry Novokshanov


2022

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Digital Resources for the Shughni Language
Yury Makarov | Maksim Melenchenko | Dmitry Novokshanov
Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes the Shughni Documentation Project consisting of the Online Shughni Dictionary, morphological analyzer, orthography converter, and Shughni corpus. The online dictionary has not only basic functions such as finding words but also facilitates more complex tasks. Representing a lexeme as a network of database sections makes it possible to search in particular domains (e.g., in meanings only), and the system of labels facilitates conditional search queries. Apart from this, users can make search queries and view entries in different orthographies of the Shughni language and send feedback in case they spot mistakes. Editors can add, modify, or delete entries without programming skills via an intuitive interface. In future, such website architecture can be applied to creating a lexical database of Iranian languages. The morphological analyzer performs automatic analysis of Shughni texts, which is useful for linguistic research and documentation. Once the analysis is complete, homonymy resolution must be conducted so that the annotated texts are ready to be uploaded to the corpus. The analyzer makes use of the orthographic converter, which helps to tackle the problem of spelling variability in Shughni, a language with no standard literary tradition.