Kirrkirr: a Bidirectional Warlpiri-English Dictionary

1
Kirrkirr a Bidirectional Warlpiri-English
Dictionary

Kristen Parton
2
Kirrkirr Objectives

• Kirrkirr aims to present the contents of a
  dictionary in a way which is flexible,
  interactive, customizable, and (especially) fun
• Kirrkirr has diverse target users, with varying
  levels of literacy, for example professional
  linguists, elementary school children, teachers,
  and native speakers
• Currently, Kirrkirr is used with the Australian
  Aboriginal language Warlpiri, spoken by about
  3,000 people in northern Australia
• Kirrkirr uses a Warlpiri-English dictionary
  developed by linguists in Australia, with
  detailed information about each word, including
  glosses, definitions, dialects, grammatical
  comments and cross-references between words for
  synonyms, antonyms, see also and other
  relationships
• Unlike paper dictionaries, electronic
  dictionaries can provide an interactive
  educational tool customizable to various
  audiences

3
Dictionary Usability

• The interface has a colorful, clickable panel
  which links words related in different ways,
  rather than just relying on the alphabetical list
  of words this also makes the dictionary more
  interactive
• Many words are linked to pictures and sounds,
  which reinforce the meaning of the words through
  non-textual means
• The dictionary uses fuzzy spelling to catch
  spelling errors made by the user when searching
  for a word
• User modes tailor the appearance of the formatted
  entries to each target audience
• English meaning only,for novice users with
  English backgrounds
• In Warlpiri, for native speakers of Warlpiri
• Basic details, for intermediate users such as
  students
• Full details, for advanced users such as teachers
  or linguists

4
Lexicon Structure

• The dictionary is maintained by linguists in
  Australia in an ad-hoc text format, which is
  converted to a structured XML dictionary by a
  Perl script
• Rather than load the large (10Mb) XML file in
  memory, each headwords XML entry is loaded
  individually as needed
• The rich structure of the XML allows XSLT
  stylesheet manipulation of the dictionary entries
  to produce output formatted differently for
  different users
• The XSLT stylesheet outputs HTML pages, which
  make use of the cross-references in the
  dictionary by creating hyperlinks between
  different words

5
Customizing Format with XSLT

• At run-time, the XML entries are processed by an
  XSLT stylesheet, which selects which elements of
  the entry to show, determines the order to show
  them in, and formats each field differently
  depending on the user mode
• For example, Meaning only outputs the english
  glosses of a word in large font, whereas Full
  details outputs all of the information in the
  dictionary in a normal sized font in a specific
  order.
• Since the XML is parsed at run-time, more
  information can be added to the XML to allow
  parameter passing from the program to the XSLT
• For example, the location of the images folder
  can only be determined at run-time, but by adding
  an ltIMAGE-DIRgt field to the XML at run-time, the
  XSLT can create an ltIMG SRCgt tag to display an
  image in the HTML output

6
English-Warlpiri Dictionary

• The original dictionary is one-way Warlpiri to
  English, but a bidirectional bilingual dictionary
  is more useful for most users
• An English index was built from glosses in the
  dictionary such that each gloss links to the
  equivalent Warlpiri entries.
• Rather than being two separate monolingual
  dictionaries, these dictionaries share the same
  data, thus eliminating conflicting entries and
  maintaining consistency
• The XML entries of all the Warlpiri equivalents
  to an English word are merged, and passed to an
  XSLT spreadsheet, which creates an HTML page for
  the English word

7
English-Warlpiri Dictionary

• To make the English dictionary symmetric to the
  Warlpiri, Kirrkirr now has an English word list,
  English formatted entries, a much faster English
  search, and the capability to do fuzzy spelling
  in English
• Problems arise because most Warlpiri words have
  several English equivalents, and also because
  phrases in English might be indexed under several
  different terms
• For example, yawarrangi meaning large male
  kangaroo should be indexed under kangaroo
  rather than large or male
• However, the jawirdiki and other words that
  mean stay put should be indexed under stay
  and not put
• Words like kirany-kiranypa meaning spinifex
  lizard should be indexed under spinifex (the
  type) and lizard

8
Warlpiri Morphology

• Warlpiri is an agglutinating language, meaning
  that grammatical suffixes get added on to words
• nyangulparnangku
• nya- ngu- lpa- rna- ngku
• See- PAST- IPFV- 1SG.SUBj- 2SG.OBJ
• I was looking at you.
• Root word nya-nyi meaning to see
• For lookup in the dictionary, users have to know
  the root word
• This is difficult for learners of Warlpiri, given
  that morphemes are not always separated by
  hyphens and verbs are indexed with non-past tense
  inflections
• To make Kirrkirr more usable, a morphological
  analyzer was implemented to accept well-formed
  Warlpiri words and find the possible root words
  to look up

9
Morphological Analysis

• Suffixes from the dictionary are stored in a trie
  for quick lookup
• Each time an affix is stripped, the remaining
  string is checked to see whether it is in the
  dictionary
• Each possible morpheme is added to a lattice
  structure which holds all possible morphological
  decompositions of the word
• Grammar rules are applied to eliminate many
  impossible parses
• Some properties of Warlpiri make parsing more
  difficult, and show the need for a different
  indexing system
• Verbs are stored with non-past inflections but
  are seen with different inflections. For example,
  nya-nyi may show up as nya-ngu. But indexing
  nya-nyi under nya creates more abiguity,
  since nya is another word.
• Some words have optional suffixes, such as
  l(pa) which may be seen as l or lpa. These
  words must be indexed under both entries.

10
Conclusions

• Making Kirrkirr a bidirectional English-Warlpiri
  and Warlpiri-English dictionary increases its
  usability and practicality, by making it easier
  for users who are more comfortable in English to
  browse and search in English.
• Allowing lookup of Warlpiri words from actual
  speech using the morphological analysis also
  increases usability, especially for users who are
  learning Warlpiri, since they do not have to
  figure out the root word.
• Future work
• Improving the morphological analysis to provide
  roughly ranked possible parses of all morphemes
  of an entire word, using more grammatical
  information and frequency information
• Extending Kirrkirr to other languages