Bigorna – A Toolkit for Orthography Migration Challenges

José João Almeida, André Santos, Alberto Simões


Abstract
Languages are born, evolve and, eventually, die. During this evolution their spelling rules (and sometimes the syntactic and semantic ones) change, putting old documents out of use. In Portugal, a pair of political agreements with Brazil forced relevant changes on the way the Portuguese language is written. In this article we will detail these two Orthographic Agreements (one in the thirties and the other more recently, in the nineties), and the challenges present on the automatic migration of old documents spelling to their actual one. We will reveal Bigorna, a toolkit for the classification of language variants, their comparison and the conversion of texts in different language versions. These tools will be explained together with examples of migration issues. As Birgorna relies on a set of conversion rules we will also discuss how to infer conversion rules from a set of documents (texts with different ages). The document concludes with a brief evaluation on the conversion and classification tool results and their relevance in the current Portuguese language scenario.
Anthology ID:
L10-1616
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/898_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
José João Almeida, André Santos, and Alberto Simões. 2010. Bigorna – A Toolkit for Orthography Migration Challenges. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Bigorna – A Toolkit for Orthography Migration Challenges (Almeida et al., LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/898_Paper.pdf