Towards the Development of Language Analysis Tools for the Written Latgalian Language

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of spell checking and morphological analysis tools for Latgalian. The Latgalian written language is a historic variant of the Latvian language. There is a wide range of language analysis tools available for Latvian, whereas the Latgalian language lacks such tools. The work is done by the joint effort of linguists who work on morphologically marked lexicon creation and IT specialists who work on language tool development. For the creation of a morphological analysis tool, we reuse the FST technology used for the Latvian morphological analyzer. We create a spelling dictionary that can be used with the Hunspell engine. All tools are accessible via Web Service. For now, the Latgalian lexicon contains 13,139 lemmas marked by 105 inflection groups. The work of lexicon replenishment still continues.