Friday, October 11, 2013

Work once use multiple times

For many of us who deal with languages where there is often not even a handful of people working this is kind of a "must reach" situation. Those languages need all the support they can get and often hours and hours of research is necessary to find out how things should go. OmegaWiki, like many other database applications can be the basis for such a situation. But many others do not make their contents freely available.
Besides dictionaries (for computer and smartphone and eventually even printed) we do need spell checkers and in almost all cases an automated translation that then only needs proof reading would be "the thing".
Years ago I already wanted to reach the possibility to automatically "feed" contents to Apertium and we are half way done to go the way OmegaWiki-Apertium. The image shows that we can annotate our words to show that a noun is male or femal in German (just to take an obvious example for me living in Germany). What is missing is the exact definition of the paradigm to be used. This should be possible via the same feature we have for annotation.
Then there comes the second cave eat: OmegaWiki people would like to build automatic inflection, based on rules. Apertium already does exactly this. This means we need the same "grammar rules" to be defined and used.
IMHO it is relevant not to invent the wheel again, but to create interfaces to already existing projects so that one can help the other.
Like I already said: it does not make sense to me to work on many different projects to protect my language, because like for all people: there is only so much time.

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