Representing Bantu Noun Classes

[John Hatton]

Hi,
FLEx represents Bantu Noun Classes as "inflection features". When export to
LIFT 0.13 with my pre-release copy of FLEx 6.0, it apparently does not
export this information. Since is a critical component of Bantu
dictionaries, Ken & Steve, can you address this problem soon?

We should agree on how it will be represented in LIFT, and I will build in a
matching field for WeSay.

thanks
John Hatton
SIL PNG, Palaso, & SIL International Software Development
Google Talk chat: hattonjohn

[Stephen_...@sil.org]

We'll try to address this issue, but it's not going to happen for FLEx 6.0, which is in the final candidate release stage.  (It's possible -- even likely -- we'll try to release a patch later to provide better LIFT capabililty.)

The issue with inflection features that they are a true feature structure.  A flat string representation may look something like this example copied from FLEx:

        [NounAgr:[genro:1/2 Num:Sg] genro:1/2 Num:Sg]

If this format is acceptible to work with, the LIFT representation could be as simple as

        <trait name="inflection-features" value="[NounAgr:[genro:1/2 Num:Sg] genro:1/2 Num:Sg]"/>

There are a lot of other issues with the grammatical information that isn't handled very well in LIFT yet.  For instance, parts of speech (what is given as the value of the <grammatical-info> elements) are actually hierarchical, and this is represented only in the lift <range-element>.  I don't know whether WeSay uses this concept, or the lift-ranges file.  (There's also a bug in FLEx that it doesn't import the hierarchy properly...)
Another problem is that the slot information (which FLEx exports as a trait inside grammatical-info) is rather useless without also having the template information, which LIFT doesn't represent.
I'm sure there are other deficiencies that also need to be addressed, but i'm embarrassed enought already.  :-(

"John Hatton" <john_...@sil.org> Sent by: lexiconinter...@googlegroups.com 09/11/2009 07:47 PM Please respond to lexiconinter...@googlegroups.com

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