Itziar Aduriz

A Cascaded Syntactic Analyser for Basque

This article presents a robust syntactic analyser for Basque and the different modules it contains. Each module is structured in different analysis layers for which each layer takes the information provided by the previous layer as its input; thus creating a gradually deeper syntactic analysis in cascade. This analysis is carried out using the Constraint Grammar (CG) formalism. Moreover, the article describes the standardisation process of the parsing formats using XML.

A word-grammar based morphological analyzer for agglutinative languages

Agglutinative languages present rich morphology and for some applications they need deep analysis at word level. The work here presented proposes a model for designing a full morphological analyzer.The model integrates the two-level formalism and a unification-based formalism. In contrast to other works, we propose to separate the treatment of sequential and non-sequential morphotactic constraints. Sequential constraints are applied in the segmentation phase, and non-sequential ones in the final feature-combination phase. Early application of sequential morphotactic constraints during the segmentation process makes feasible an efficient implementation of the full morphological analyzer.The result of this research has been the design and implementation of a full morphosyntactic analysis procedure for each word in unrestricted Basque texts.

A morphological analysis based method for spelling correction

Xuxen is a spelling checker/corrector for Basque which is going to be comercialized next year. The checker recognizes a word-form if a correct morphological breakdown is allowed. The morphological analysis is based on two-level morphology. The correction method distinguishes between orthographic errors and typographical errors. • Typographical errors (or misstypings) are uncognitive errors which do not follow linguistic criteria. • Orthographic errors are cognitive errors which occur when the writer does not know or has forgotten the correct spelling for a word. They are more persistent because of their cognitive nature, they leave worse impression and, finally, its treatment is an interesting application for language standardization purposes.

Rule-Based Translation of Spanish Verb-Noun Combinations into Basque

This paper presents a method to improve the translation of Verb-Noun Combinations (VNCs) in a rule-based Machine Translation (MT) system for SpanishBasque. Linguistic information about a set of VNCs is gathered from the public database Konbitzul, and it is integrated into the MT system, leading to an improvement in BLEU, NIST and TER scores, as well as the results being significantly better according to human evaluators.