VXE (Visual XFST Editor)

Abstract

Until now, there has been no computational morphology description of the Maltese Language. The main problem is that a linguist has the knowledge to describe the morphology of a natural language but on the other hand is not an expert in Computer Science. Similarly, a Computer Scientist has the knowledge in his/her area, but would not be an expert in linguistics. The aim of our project is to bridge the gap between the two. VXE is a development environment to create morphological descriptions of natural languages. From our research we found out that finite state technology is the most suited for computational morphology. From the various finite state compilers available, Xerox XRCE was chosen. We found out it has the most features and caters for computational morphology especially when dealing with Semitic Languages. XFST can be used either interactively or using scripts. The editor provides a graphical user interface through which the scripts needed are generated. The system will also cater for problems involved to encode the Maltese Language like the "gn" and "ie". Since XFST uses Unicode, there are no problems with non-standard characters (n,g,z and c). From our initial evaluation, we concluded that the main aims of our project were met. We managed to completely hide the generation of the scripts from the user and managed to come up with a system that caters for the morphological features that are found in the Maltese language.