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Proceedings of APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2017 12 - 15 December 2017, Malaysia

Language Resource Construction for Mongolian

Shipeng Xu* , Hongzhi Yu†, Thomas Fang Zheng‡, Guanyu Li§ and Gegeentana£ *Key Laboratory of National language intelligent processing, , Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, -mail: [email protected] Tel: +86-18394170747 †Key Laboratory of National language intelligent processing, Gansu Province, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +86-13909318273 ‡Center for Speech and Language Technologies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +86-13801012234 §Key Laboratory of National language intelligent processing, Gansu Province, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +86-13809316272 £Key Laboratory of National language intelligent processing, Gansu Province, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +86-13893303181

Abstract— Mongolian is a typical low-resource language. The publish research based on their own private data, which resource limitation is in various aspects, from acoustic analysis, makes the results incomparable and hence doubtable. In this phonetic rules, lexicon, speech and text data. This paper paper, we will describe our work on Mongolian language describes our recent progression on Mongolian resource resource construction, and release two resources for public construction supported by the NSFC M2ASR project. Firstly, usage: a text corpus that consists of 60k Mongolian sentences, we collected the text data of Mongolian containing more than 60,000 sentences from the newspaper, internet and Mongolian and a Mongolian-Chinese dictionary that consists of 25000 books. Secondly, we built the initial dictionary of Mongolian Mongolian words. These resources are valuable for multiple based on the Mongolian Chinese Dictionary. All the resources are studies, including acoustics, linguistics and speech processing. published following the M2ASR Free Data Program. Our work is part of the Multilingual Minor lingual Automatic Speech Recognition (M2ASR), which is supported I. INTRODUCTION by the National Fundamental Science of China (NFSC). The project is a three-party collaboration, including Tsinghua Mongolian is a nomadic nation mainly distributed in the University, the Northwest National University, and east region of Asia. There are more than 10 million University. The aim of this project is to construct speech Mongolians in the world. It is the main nationality of the State recognition systems for five minor languages in China of , and in China, Mongolians is one of the major (Tibetan, Mongolia, Uyghur, Kazak and Kirgiz). However, minority nations, with a population of more than 6 million our ambition is beyond that scope: we hope to construct a full people. Most of them live in the Autonomous set of linguistic and speech resources for the 5 languages, and Region, others are distributed in the neighboring , make them open and free for research purposes. We call this including , , , Xinjiang, etc [1]. the M2ASR Free Data Program. All the data resources, Mongolian belongs to the Altai , Mongolia including the ones published in this paper, are released branch [2]. It is the main communication tools of Mongolian through the website of the project http://m2asr.cslt.org. people. Mongolian in China can be divided into three : This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents some the inner Mongolia (or the central dialect), the Baltu- basic knowledge of Mongolian. Section 3 describes the Buryat dialect (or the northeast dialect) and the Weilate collection of the text resource. The dictionary construction is dialect (or the west dialect). The inner Mongolia dialect is presented in Section 4, and some concluding remarks are most widely used compared to the other two dialects. given in the final section. Mongolian is not only a practical language, but also an of academic research, e.g., a tool to study the historical II. CHARACTERS OF MONGOLIAN development of Mongolian and Altai nations and languages. Therefore, many people learn and study Mongolian in the world. As an example, the International Conference of A. Alphabets Mongolian Scholars was held in every five years [3]. In China, many institutes established specific research The Mongolian is alphabetic. It contains 35 labs to study Mongolian, such as the Institute of Ethnology alphabets, including 8 , 17 basic consonants and 10 and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences [4] preposition consonants [6]. The alphabets involve a lot of and the Inner Mongolia University [5]. variants. For example, depending on the position (top, middle In spite of the great importance of Mongolian, the research and bottom) of the alphabet within the word, the alphabet may on this language largely lags behind the major languages such as Chinese and English. A key reason is that the linguistic and  speech resources are very limited, and the existing resources Supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Project (Grant No. 61633013) and the Natural Science Foundation of Gansu Province, are far from open and standard. Most of research institutes China (Grant No. 1506RJZA268).

978-1-5386-1542-3@2017 APSIPA APSIPA ASC 2017 Proceedings of APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2017 12 - 15 December 2017, Malaysia

change. Moreover, the same word may pronounce differently sentences only contain one word and the longest sentences in different contexts. Table I shows the 35 Mongolian letters contain more than 200 words. The coding of the text is UTF-8. defined by the GB 25914-2010 national standard [7]. Note The text file is 14.7 M in the disk. that we have defined a Latin form for each Mongolian letter, A number of language-specific normalization steps were which eases the text processing by computers. conducted. The purpose was to convert non-standard words to standard ones. In the Mongolian text, non-standard words are TABLE I MONGOLIAN ALPHABET the words containing non-Mongolian characters, such as Latin consonant Latin consonant Latin consonant Latin numbers, English characters and other functional ᠠ a ᠨ n ᠱ š ᠺ k symbols (e.g., ^, $). We found that there were about 2500 ᠡ e ᠩ ng ᠲ t ᠻ lk ᠢ᠌ i ᠪ b ᠳ d ᠼ c sentences that contain non-standard words. Most of the non- ᠣ o ᠫ p ᠴ č ᠽ z standard words are numbers, such as time and telephone ᠤ u ᠬ x ᠵ ǰ ᠾ h numbers. ᠥ ö ᠭ g ᠶ y ᠿ zr ᠦ ü ᠮ m ᠷ r ᡀ lh ᠧ ee ᠯ l ᠸ w ᡁ zh IV. MONGOLIAN-CHINESE DICTIONARY ᠰ s ᠹ f ᡂ ch The main contribution of this study is that we constructed a B. Mongolian-Chinese dictionary that more than 25k words. As far as we known, this is the first open and free electronic Syllable is the unit of Mongolian pronunciation. A syllable dictionary for Mongolian-Chinese pairs. This resource will may consist of one or several . Most of the greatly benefit related research, for example speech are structured in one of six forms: V, VC, VCC, CV, CVC recognition. and CVCC, where V represents a vowel, and C represents a consonant. Taking account the foreign words, the possible A. Building the initial dictionary syllable structures could be richer. Table Ⅱ shows the typical We choose the Mongolian Chinese Dictionary as the initial syllable structures. dictionary for our study. This dictionary is very famous and has a great impact on the study of Mongolian. A particular reason to choose it as our initial resource is that this TABLE Ⅱ MONGOLIAN ALPHABET Type Word IPA Type Word IPA dictionary gives the IPA spelling of each word. V ɑ CV tɑ We manually input the paper-version of this dictionary into VC æl CVV bi: computer to obtain the electronic version. The input was VV ɑɪ CVC nɑr reviewed by several Mongolian students to ensure the quality. VVC ɑ:b CVVC nææʣ This leads to our initial dictionary that contains more than VCC ɑlt CVCC nɛbʧ 25,000 words. For each word, the information includes the VVCC ɑ:lʤ CVVCC ny:rs prototype, the Latin form, the API pronunciation and the Chinese meaning. C. word B. The conversion of IPA Mongolian words can be categorized into 13 classes: , , quantifier, time and location, pronoun, , adverb, The IPA table is a general and standard representation of modal, imitated words, postposition, , pronunciations of a language, whoever using IPA directly is and emotional words. Table III presents some not convenient as the letters used by IPA are not easy to be examples. processed. Therefore, we designed a conversion rule that change IPA letters to simple Latin character compositions. TABLE Ⅲ MONGOLIAN WORD TYPES This new representation can be called as NIPA. Table Ⅳ Type Example Mean Type Example Mean shows the conversion rule. Applying this rule, the IPA-based noun ᠡᠳᠦᠷ daytime modal ꠠᠷᠤᠭ about Imitate d pronunciation is converted to NIPA-based pronunciation. adjective ᠰᠠᠶᠢᠨ good ᠬᠠ ha ha woeds quantifier ᠨᠢᠭᠡ one postposition ᠠᠳᠠᠯᠢ same TABLE Ⅳ CONVERSION RULE FROM IPA TO NIPA time and IPA NIPA IPA NIPA IPA NIPA IPA NIPA ᠡᠮᠦ south modal particle ᠤᠤᠶ query location a a e1s l, l2 ʅ: i2l pronoun ꠢ i conjunction ꠠ and ă as e: m m t t verb ᠢᠳᠡᠤᠵᠤ eat emotional ᠣ Wake up a: al1 : e1l n n tʃ ch adverb ᠨᠡᠯᠢᠶ fairly æ a1 ʳ e1r n, n1 u u æ: a12 f f ŋ ng ʊ u1 aɪ ai1 g g1 o o u: ul III. TEXT CORPUS aʊ au1 g, m ö o2 ʊ: u1l We collected a Mongolian text corpus that contains more b b i i os ui ui than 60,000 sentences. The data sources involve newspaper, c c ɪ i1 o: ol ʊɪ u1i1 ɔ a2 ɪ: i1l ø: e3l w w internet and books, and the sentences are in various domains. ɔ: a2l i: il2 œ e4 x x The total number of words is about 35,000. The shortest d d iɛ ie2 œ: e4l x, x1

978-1-5386-1542-3@2017 APSIPA APSIPA ASC 2017 Proceedings of APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2017 12 - 15 December 2017, Malaysia

dz dz ɪʊ iu1 p p ʏ y1 ᠢᠶᠠᠷ After the word ending with [ɔ:r] dʐ dzh ɪʊ: iu1l r r y: yl consonants; [o:r] dʒ dg j j ɿ: i3l y y1y [a:s] ᠡᠴᠡ After the word ending with [ :s] e e k k s s ʐ z Congci case ᠡᠴᠡ ača/eče ɔ a2s l l ʂ sh1 r, r1 both of vowels and consonants; [ɔ:s] e1 ɬ l1 ʃ sh ʅ i2 [o:s] [tæ:] ᠲᠠᠢ After the word ending with Hetong case ᠲᠠᠢ tai/tei [t :] both of vowels and consonants; C. Dictionary coverage [tœ:] ᠯᠤᠭ᠌ᠠ After the positive word [læ:] With the initial dictionary, we checked the coverage of the ᠯᠤᠭ᠌ᠠ luɣ-a (compact vowel) Lianhe case [l :] ᠯᠤᠭᠡ lüge ᠯᠤᠭᠡ After the negative word (loose dictionary for the text corpus built in the last section. The result shows only less than 6,000 sentences (about 10%) were vowels) completely covered by the dictionary. Further analysis shows that only about 5,000 words in the dictionary appeared in the Table Ⅵ presents the rule of forms. The plural form text data. The reasons we found are mainly the following two: in Mongolian is different from that in English. The first four 1. The rule of Mongolian is rather flexible, cases just need to add the suffix as a single word behind the which results in many inflections that were not covered target word. The other two cases append the suffix to the by the initial dictionary. target word to form a new word. 2. There are many foreign words (words borrowed from other languages, mainly from Chinese) in the text data, TABLE Ⅵ MONGOLIAN PLURAL FORM such as geographic name and name of person. These Suffix IPA Usage Notes After the noun describing people Separate words cannot be well covered by the initial vocabulary. ᠨᠤᠭᠦᠳ [nʊ:d] and things ending with vowels or n with the ᠨᠤᠭᠤᠳ [nu:d] D. Morphology rules for dictionary improvement consonant; noun After the consonant (except n) at the Separate [ʊ:d] For the foreign words, it is possible to label them manually. ᠦᠳ end of the word describing people with the [u:d] We are doing so at present. For the flexible morphology, it is and things; noun Separate much more difficult. It is not possible to label all the [nar] ᠨᠠᠷ After the noun describing people with the inflections by hand, so an automatic approach is necessary. [n r] noun As the first step, we have collected a full set of morphology With the After the adjective expressing the rules, and utilize them to generate the pronunciations and ᠴᠤᠳ ʧʊ:d][ʧu:d] noun of human attributes and ᠴᠤᠤᠯ [ʧʊ:l][ʧu:l] attached meanings of inflection words. some noun (such as ethnic names) Table Ⅴ ~ table Ⅹ summarize some of the most important together With rules. Table Ⅴ presents the eight cases in Mongolian. The After the noun ending with n the (especially qin), occasionally added nominative, freeze-frame and objective cases are the most ᠳ [d] noun to a few ending with r, l, i, or well-known. The Xiangwei case represents the relationship attached su (with off) between indirect object and the , as well as the together relationship between the adverbial and the discourse. The ᠰ After some of the nouns ending with With the the vowel. Occasionally added to a noun [s] Pingjie case and Congci cases can represent both indirect few words ending with the n, l, i, attached object and adverbial. The Hetong case describes the and there are voice off phenomenon together relationship between indirect objects and . The Lianhe case appears very few in modern Mongolian. Table Ⅶ shows the possession form of nouns. The possession of a noun reflects the affiliation of a . In TABLE Ⅴ MONGOLIAN CASE Mongolian, the possession form is formulated by adding a Additional Name Usage IPA suffix composition as a single word behind the target. ingredients nominative ᠶᠢᠨ After the word ending with TABLE Ⅶ THE POSSESSION FORM vowels; ᠶᠢᠨ yin [i:n] Form IPA Means ᠤᠨAfter the consonant (except n) freeze-frame ᠤᠨ un/ün [æ:] ᠮᠢᠨᠢ [min] First person (singular) at the end of the word; ᠤ u/ü [ :] ᠴᠢᠨᠢ [ʧin] Second person (singular) ᠤ Only after the word ending with Person ᠨᠢ [ni] Third person (singular) n consonants; genitive ᠮᠠᠨᠠᠢ [man] First person (majority) ᠳᠤ After the ending with vowels [tan] Second person (majority) and l, m, n, ng consonants of the ᠲᠠᠨᠢ Xiangwei ᠳᠤ du [d] word; Reflexive ꠠᠨ [a:n][ :n] case ᠳᠦ tu [t] ᠳᠦ After the word ending with b, g, genitive ᠢᠶᠠᠨ [xa:n] [x :n] r, s, d consonant; ᠶᠢ After the word ending with Table Ⅷ is the mood verb suffix. Mood represents the objective ᠶᠢ yi vowels; [i:] speaker’s attitude to the relationship between the behavior and case ᠢ i ᠢ After the word ending with [i:ɡ] consonants; the object. The mood of Mongolian verb can be categorized ꠡᠷ bar/bᠢᠶᠠᠷ ꠡᠷ After the word ending with [a:r] into two types: the first is the imperative mood and the other Pingjie case iyar/iyer vowels; [ :r] is statement mood.

978-1-5386-1542-3@2017 APSIPA APSIPA ASC 2017 Proceedings of APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2017 12 - 15 December 2017, Malaysia

Continuous body ᠭ᠌ᠠ ᠂ ᠭᠡ [a:] [ɔ:] [ :] [o:] ᠮᠠᠷ [ma:r] [mɔ:r] [m :r] Likelihood participle TABLE Ⅷ THE MOOD VERB SUFFIX ᠮ᠌ᠠ [mo:r] [m] Type Form IPA Main body participle ᠬᠴᠢ ᠂ ᠭᠴᠢ [gtʃ] ᠶ᠌ᠠ [j] First person ᠰᠤᠭᠠᠢ ᠂ ᠰᠤᠭᠡᠢ [sʊgæ:][sug :] [gtʊn] [gtun] ᠭᠲᠤᠨ ᠭᠲᠦᠨ E. The current release [a:ræ:] [ɔ:rœ:] [ :re:] Second person ᠭᠠᠷᠠᠢ ᠭᠡᠷᠡᠢ [o:re:] imperative ᠭᠠᠴᠢ ᠭᠡᠴᠢ This construction of the resource is still undergoing. At [a:tʃ] [ɔ:tʃ] [ :tʃ] [o:tʃ] mood present, our latest release is a dictionary containing 26462 [ag] [ɔg] [ g] [og] ᠭ 됌 words that include 25962 words inherited from the initial [tʊgæ:] [tuge:] ᠳᠣᠭᠠᠢ ᠳᠦᠭᠡᠢ Third person [a:sæ:] [ɔ:sæ:] [ :se:] dictionary, and 500 words constructed using the ᠭᠠᠰᠠᠢ ᠭᠡᠰᠡᠢ [o:se:] morphological rules. This dictionary has been double checked ᠭᠤᠵᠠᠢ ᠭᠦᠵᠡᠢ [gʊ:dʒæ:] [gu:dʒe:] by native Mongolians. ᠌ᠵᠢ ᠴᠢ [dʒ][ tʃ] ᠵᠠᠢ ᠴᠠᠢ [dʒe:] [tʃe:] statement ꠠ [w] V. CONCLUSIONS mood ᠨ᠌ᠠ [n] Present tense ᠵᠤ ꠠᠶᠢᠨ᠌ᠠ [dʒæ:n] We present our recent progress on Mongolian linguistic tense ᠯ᠌ᠠ [la:] [lɔ:] [l :] [lo:] resource construction, and release two resources: a text corpus and a Mongolian-Chinese dictionary. All the resources are Table IX presents the vice verb, which is the connection free for research usages. In the future, we will keep on between two verbs. The main characteristic of vice verb is the releasing larger text corpus and dictionary, plus other connection and it can be categorized into three types, as language and speech resources. Particularly, we will release shown in table Ⅸ. Finally, Table Ⅹ describes the participle more than 100 hours of Mongolian speech signals to assist the suffixes. Participle can express behavior, action and the nature speech recognition community. characteristic of an object. Therefore, a participle has both the nature of verbs and adjectives. REFERENCES [1] Population Census Office under the State Council, “Epartment TABLE Ⅸ THE VICE VERB SUFFIXES of Population and Employment Statistics of National Bureau of Type Form IPA Statistics”, Tabulation on the 2010 Population Census of the People’s Republic of China．China Statistics Press．2012. Simple Tied vice verbs ᠵᠤ ᠴᠤ [dʒ][ tʃ] connecti- [2] Qing Gelier, “Mongolian Grammar”, Inner Mongolia People's Separation vice verbs ᠭᠠᠳ ᠂ ᠭᠡᠳ [a:d] [ɔ:d] [ :d [o:d] on vice Publishing House, 1991. verbs Joint vice verbs ᠨ [n] [3] Д.Jegmeide, Xuwei Gao, “The First International Conference of Mongolian Scholars”, Mongolian Studies, 1990 (3) 65-66. [magtʃ] [mɔgtʃ] [m gtʃ] ᠮᠠᠭᠴᠠ ᠮᠡᠭᠴᠡ [4] He Hu, “Acoustic Phonetics Clues in the Evolution of Vo wels Immediately vice verbs [mogtʃ] ᠨᠠᠷᠠᠨ [na:ra:n][ n :r :n] of Mongolian”, Journal of central university for nationalities [xla:r] [xlɔ:r] [xl :r] (philosophy and social sciences edition), 2015 (4), pp. 142-151 ᠬᠤᠯᠠᠷ ᠬᠦᠯᠡᠷ Follow vice verbs [xlo:r] [5] Lan, Dabhurbayar, GUAN Xiaoda and ZHO Qiang, “Phrase ᠬᠤᠯ᠌ᠠ ᠬᠦᠯ᠌ᠡ [xlæ:] [xle:] Structure Prasing of Mongolian”, Journal of chinese ᠮᠠᠨᠵᠢᠨ [mæ:ndʒin] [me:ndʒin] information processing, 2014,28(5), pp. 162-169. premise vice verbs ᠮᠠᠨ [mæ:n] [me:n] [6] GB 25914-2010: “information technology of traditional Restrict ꠠᠯ [wal] [wɔl] [w l] [wol] Assuming vice verbs Mongolian nominal characters, presentation characters and connecti- ꠠᠰᠤ [was] [wɔs] [w s] [wos] control characters using the rules” , 2011-01-10, publish (2011) on vice ꠠᠴᠤ [wtʃ] Concessions vice verbs [7] Inner Mongolia University, Mongolian Language Institute, verbs [ja:tʃ] [jɔ:tʃ] [j :tʃ] [jo:tʃ] ᠶᠠᠴᠤ “Mongolian and Chinese Dictionary”, Inner Mongolia Meet vice verbs ᠳ᠋ᠠᠯ᠌ᠠ [tal] [tɔl] [t l] [tol] University Press, 1999. ᠬᠠᠷ 뀡ᠷ [xa:r] [xɔ:r] [x :r] [xo:r] Purpose vice verbs ᠬᠤᠶ᠌ᠠ ᠬᠦᠶ᠌ᠡ [xʊja:] [xuje:] ᠩᠭ᠌ᠠ ᠂ [ŋga:] [ŋgɔ:] [ ŋg :] ᠩᠭᠡ Opportunity vice verbs [ŋgo:] ᠩᠭᠤᠳᠠ ᠂ [ŋgʊ:t] [ŋgu:t] ᠩᠬᠦᠳᠡ Mixed connecti- ᠭᠰᠠᠭᠠᠷ Continuation vice verbs [sa:r] [sɔ:r] [s :r] [so:r] on vice ᠭᠰᠡᠭᠡᠷ verbs

TABLE Ⅹ THE PARTICIPLE SUFFIXES Type Form IPA past tense participle ᠭᠰᠠᠨ ᠂ ᠭᠰᠡᠨ [san] [sɔn] [s n] [son] Present and Future Tenses participle ᠬᠤ ᠂ 뀦 [x] Regular body participle ᠳ᠋ᠠᠭ ᠂ ᠳ᠋ᠡ됌 [dag] [dɔg] [d g] [dog]

978-1-5386-1542-3@2017 APSIPA APSIPA ASC 2017