Lexicon Induction for Spoken Rusyn – Challenges and Results Achim Rabus Yves Scherrer Department of Slavonic Studies Department of Linguistics University of Freiburg University of Geneva Germany Switzerland achim.rabus@
[email protected] slavistik.uni-freiburg.de Abstract 2 Rusyn and the Corpus of Spoken Rusyn This paper reports on challenges and re- sults in developing NLP resources for spo- Rusyn belongs to the Slavic language family and ken Rusyn. Being a Slavic minority lan- is spoken predominantly in the Carpathian region, guage, Rusyn does not have any resources most notably in Transcarpathian Ukraine, Eastern to make use of. We propose to build Slovakia, and South Eastern Poland, where it is 1 a morphosyntactic dictionary for Rusyn, called Lemko. Some scholars claim Rusyn to be combining existing resources from the et- a dialect of Ukrainian (Skrypnyk, 2013), others ymologically close Slavic languages Rus- see it as an independent Slavic language (Pugh, sian, Ukrainian, Slovak, and Polish. We 2009; Plishkova, 2009). While there is no deny- adapt these resources to Rusyn by us- ing the fact that Ukrainian is the standard lan- ing vowel-sensitive Levenshtein distance, guage closest to the Rusyn varieties, certain dis- hand-written language-specific transfor- tinct features at all linguistic levels can be detected. mation rules, and combinations of the two. This makes the Rusyn varieties take an interme- Compared to an exact match baseline, we diary position between the East and West Slavic increase the coverage of the resulting mor- languages (for more details see, e.g., Teutsch phological dictionary by up to 77.4% rel- (2001)).