Niko Partanen

University of Helsinki | HY · Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies

After the introduction of large language models (LLMs), science has not remained the same. Researchers from several different fields of science have been rushing to conduct research on LLMs. This is due to the fact that LLMs are no longer something only machine learning experts can understand. As the middle L in LLM stands for language, it is evide...

Old Permic, also known as Old Komi, is an extinct variety of Komi that was spoken in the late Middle Ages in the lower Vychegda river basin in Northeastern European Russia, in an area that currently is not Komi-speaking. This language variety is attested in fragmentary records from the 14th to 17th century written both in the Old Permic alphabet an...

We present our work towards building an infrastructure for documenting endangered languages with the focus on Uralic languages in particular. Our infrastructure consists of tools to write dictionaries so that entries are struc-tured in XML format. These dictionaries are the foundation for rule-based NLP tools such as FSTs. We also work actively tow...

This document is dedicated to a young man, who, despite the number of times he has traveled around the Sun, is always open to new thoughts on ways to include languages, especially the smaller ones, and the people who speak them in far-reaching and sustainable open-source development. Since Trond Trosterud in Tromsø is attributed a terrific track re...

Many endangered Uralic languages have multilingual machine readable dictionaries saved in an XML format. However, the dictionaries cover translations very inconsistently between language pairs, for instance, the Livonian dictionary has some translations to Finnish, Lat-vian and Estonian, and the Komi-Zyrian dictionary has some translations to Finni...

The study forms a technical report of various tasks that have been performed on the materials collected and published by Finnish ethnographer and linguist, Matthias Alexander Castr\'en (1813-1852). The Finno-Ugrian Society is publishing Castr\'en's manuscripts as new critical and digital editions, and at the same time different research groups have...

We present a new approach to inducing a bilingual dictionary between the endangered Erzya and Moksha languages automatically based on existing dictionaries in other languages. This work is, for the most part, complementary to the Mordvin research done by PhD László Keresztes, who has demonstrated the alignment of the two language forms in morpholog...

The study forms a technical report of various tasks that have been performed on the materials collected and published by Finnish ethnographer and linguist, Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813-1852). The Finno-Ugrian Society is publishing Castrén's manuscripts as new critical and digital editions, and at the same time different research groups have als...

This study discusses the way different numerals and related expressions are currently annotated in the Universal Dependencies project, with specific focus on the Uralic language family. We analyse different annotation conventions between individual treebanks, and aim to highlight some areas where further development work and systematization could p...

We present the first openly available corpus for detecting depression in Thai. Our corpus is compiled by expert verified cases of depression in several online blogs. We experiment with two different LSTM based models and two different BERT based models. We achieve a 77.53% accuracy with a Thai BERT model in detecting depression. This establishes a...

We present the first openly available corpus for detecting depression in Thai. Our corpus is compiled by expert verified cases of depression in several online blogs. We experiment with two different LSTM based models and two different BERT based models. We achieve a 77.53\% accuracy with a Thai BERT model in detecting depression. This establishes a...

Finnish is a language with multiple dialects that not only differ from each other in terms of accent (pronunciation) but also in terms of morphological forms and lexical choice. We present the first approach to automatically detect the dialect of a speaker based on a dialect transcript and transcript with audio recording in a dataset consisting of...

There are two main written Komi varieties , Permyak and Zyrian. These are mutually intelligible but derive from different parts of the same Komi dialect continuum, representing the varieties prominent in the vicinity and in the cities of Syktyvkar and Kudymkar, respectively. Hence, they share a vast number of features, as well as the majority of th...

Finnish is a language with multiple dialects that not only differ from each other in terms of accent (pronunciation) but also in terms of morphological forms and lexical choice. We present the first approach to automatically detect the dialect of a speaker based on a dialect transcript and transcript with audio recording in a dataset consisting of...

This study describes the ongoing development of the finite-state description for an endangered minority language, Komi-Zyrian. This work is located in the context where large written and spoken language corpora are available, which creates a set of unique challenges that have to be, and can be, addressed. We describe how we have designed the transd...

Tässä artikkelissa kokeilemme erilaisia menetelmiä kuvaavien piirteiden tuottamiseksi 151:lle alkuperäiselle Pokémonille. Tuotamme eri menetelmillä sanavektorimalleja nettikorpuksen avulla, ja luokittelemme niillä automaattisesti englannin kielen adjektiiveja sen perusteella, kuinka ominaisia ne ovat tietylle Pokémonille. Kokeidemme perusteella voi...

We present different methods for obtaining descriptive properties automatically for the 151 original Pokémon. We train several different word embeddings models on a crawled Pokémon corpus, and use them to rank automatically English adjectives based on how characteristic they are to a given Pokémon. Based on our experiments, it is better to train a...

In this paper, we present our free and open-source online dictionary editing system that has been developed for editing the new edition of the Finnish-Skolt Sami dictionary. We describe how the system can be used in post-editing a dictionary and how NLP methods have been incorporated as a part of the workflow. In practice, this means the use of FST...

Texts written in Old Literary Finnish represent the first literary work ever written in Finnish starting from the 16th century. There have been several projects in Finland that have digitized old publications and made them available for research use. However, using modern NLP methods in such data poses great challenges. In this paper we propose an...

Texts written in Old Literary Finnish represent the first literary work ever written in Finnish starting from the 16th century. There have been several projects in Finland that have digitized old publications and made them available for research use. However, using modern NLP methods in such data poses great challenges. In this paper we propose an...

This paper presents and discusses the first Universal Dependencies treebank for the Apurinã language. The treebank contains 76 fully annotated sentences, applies 14 parts-of-speech, as well as seven augmented or new features-some of which are unique to Apurinã. The construction of the treebank has also served as an opportunity to develop finite-sta...

This study presents a new dataset on rumor detection in Finnish language news headlines. We have evaluated two different LSTM based models and two different BERT models, and have found very significant differences in the results. A fine-tuned FinBERT reaches the best overall accuracy of 94.3% and rumor label accuracy of 96.0% of the time. However,...

This paper presents and discusses the first Universal Dependencies treebank for the Apurin\~a language. The treebank contains 76 fully annotated sentences, applies 14 parts-of-speech, as well as seven augmented or new features - some of which are unique to Apurin\~a. The construction of the treebank has also served as an opportunity to develop fini...

This study presents a new dataset on rumor detection in Finnish language news headlines. We have evaluated two different LSTM based models and two different BERT models , and have found very significant differences in the results. A fine-tuned FinBERT reaches the best overall accuracy of 94.3% and rumor label accuracy of 96.0% of the time. However,...

We train neural models for morphological analysis, generation and lemmatization for morphologically rich languages. We present a method for automatically extracting substantially large amount of training data from FSTs for 22 languages, out of which 17 are endangered. The neural models follow the same tagset as the FSTs in order to make it possible...

We train neural models for morphological analysis, generation and lemmatization for morphologically rich languages. We present a method for automatically extracting substantially large amount of training data from FSTs for 22 languages, out of which 17 are endangered. The neural models follow the same tagset as the FSTs in order to make it possible...

This is the Festschrift of Dr. Jack Rueter. The book presents peer-reviewed scientific work from Dr. Rueter’s colleagues related to the latest advances in natural language processing, digital resources and endangered languages in a variety of languages such as historical English, Chukchi, Mansi, Erzya, Komi, Finnish, Apurina, Sign Languages, Sami l...

This is a Festschrift for Dr. Jack Rueter, compiled on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The book consists of peer-reviewed scientific work by Dr. Rueter’s colleagues. Its contents, compiled by well-established scholars and researchers in NLP, linguistics, philology and digital humanities, pertain to latest advances in natural language processing,...

This study presents new experiments on Zyrian Komi speech recognition. We use Deep-Speech to train ASR models from a language documentation corpus that contains both contemporary and archival recordings. Earlier studies have shown that transfer learning from English and using a domain matching Komi language model both improve the CER and WER. In th...

We present an open-source online dictionary editing system, Ve'rdd, that offers a chance to re-evaluate and edit grassroots dictionaries that have been exposed to multiple amateur editors. The idea is to incorporate community activities into a state-of-the-art finite-state language description of a seriously endangered minority language, Skolt Sami...

We present an open-source online dictionary editing system, Ve rdd, that offers a chance to re-evaluate and edit grassroots dictionaries that have been exposed to multiple amateur editors. The idea is to incorporate community activities into a state-of-the-art finite-state language description of a seriously endangered minority language, Skolt Sami...

Our study presents a series of experiments on speech recognition with endangered and extinct Samoyedic languages, spoken in Northern and Southern Siberia. To best of our knowledge, this is the first time a functional ASR system is built for an extinct language. We achieve with Kamas language a Label Error Rate of 15\%, and conclude through careful...

Our study presents a dialect normalization method for different Finland Swedish dialects covering six regions. We tested 5 different models, and the best model improved the word error rate from 76.45 to 28.58. Contrary to results reported in earlier research on Finnish dialects, we found that training the model with one word at a time gave best res...

We present an open-source online dictionary editing system, Ve'rdd, that offers a chance to re-evaluate and edit grassroots dictionaries that have been exposed to multiple amateur editors. The idea is to incorporate community activities into a state-of-the-art finite-state language description of a seriously endangered minority language, Skolt Sami...

This document describes shared development of finite-state description of two closely related but endangered minority languages, Erzya and Moksha. It touches upon morpholexical unity and diversity of the two languages and how this provides a motivation for shared open-source FST development. We describe how we have designed the transducers so that...

Our study presents a dialect normalization method for different Finland Swedish dialects covering six regions. We tested 5 different models, and the best model improved the word error rate from 76.45 to 28.58. Contrary to results reported in earlier research on Finnish dialects, we found that training the model with one word at a time gave best res...

This study uses a character level neural machine translation approach trained on a long short-term memory-based bi-directional recurrent neural network architecture for diacritization of Medieval Arabic. The results improve from the online tool used as a baseline. A diacritization model have been published openly through an easy to use Python packa...

We present a novel approach for adapting text written in standard Finnish to different dialects. We experiment with character level NMT models both by using a multi-dialectal and transfer learning approaches. The models are tested with over 20 different dialects. The results seem to favor transfer learning, although not strongly over the multi-dial...

We present a novel approach for adapting text written in standard Finnish to different dialects. We experiment with character level NMT models both by using a multi-dialectal and transfer learning approaches. The models are tested with over 20 different dialects. The results seem to favor transfer learning, although not strongly over the multi-dial...

This article introduces the Wanca 2017 corpus of texts crawled from the internet from which the sentences in rare Uralic languages for the use of the Uralic Language Identification (ULI) 2020 shared task were collected. We describe the ULI dataset and how it was constructed using the Wanca 2017 corpus and texts in different languages from the Leipz...

We present a novel approach for adapting text written in standard Finnish to different dialects. We experiment with character level NMT models both by using a multi-dialectal and transfer learning approaches. The models are tested with over 20 different dialects. The results seem to favor transfer learning, although not strongly over the multi-dial...

Our study presents a series of experiments on speech recognition with endangered and extinct Samoyedic languages, spoken in Northern and Southern Siberia. To best of our knowledge, this is the first time a functional ASR system is built for an extinct language. We achieve with Kamas language a Label Error Rate of 15%, and conclude through careful e...

We compare different LSTMs and transformer models in terms of their effectiveness in normalizing dialectal Finnish into the normative standard Finnish. As dialect is the common way of communication for people online in Finnish, such a normalization is a necessary step to improve the accuracy of the existing Finnish NLP tools that are tailored for n...

This paper attempts to evaluate some of the systematic differences in Uralic Universal Dependencies treebanks from a perspective that would help to introduce reasonable improvements in treebank annotation consistency within this language family. The study finds that the coverage of Uralic languages in the project is already relatively high, and the...

This paper presents experiments done in order to build a functional OCR model for the Unified Northern Alphabet. This writing system was used between 1931 and 1937 for 16 (Uralic and non-Uralic) minority languages spoken in the Soviet Union. The character accuracy of the developed model reaches more than 98% and clearly shows cross-linguistic appli...

Мы представляем открытую онлайн-инфраструктуру для редактирования и визуализации сло- варей разных уральских языков (например, эрзя, мокша, скольт-саамский и коми-зырянский). Наша инфраструктура полностью интегрируется в существующую Giellatekno с точки зрения словарей XML и морфологии FST. Наш код в открытом источнике.

The systematic integration of pre-digital published transcriptions of legacy language materials offers many possiblities to enrich documentary corpora with data that is often very comparable to contemporary collections, and often originating from the same speech communities reesearchers currently work with. Especially recent advances in text recogn...

This article presents an attempt to apply efficient parsing methods based on recursive neural networks to languages for which very few resources are available. We propose an original approach based on multilingual word embeddings acquired from different languages so as to determine the best language combination for learning. The approach yields com...

The poster describes work-in-progress by the Izhva Komi language documentation project, which records new spoken language data, digitizes available recordings and annotate these multimedia data in order to provide a comprehensive language corpus as a databases for future research on and for this endangered – and under-described – Uralic speech comm...

This chapter discusses language shift, attrition and variation as related features of a community undergoing rapid cultural change, including ethnic and linguistic assimilation. We focus on Karelian, an endangered Finnic minority language relatively closely related to Finnish, from the perspectives of language attitudes, ethnic identities, language...

The paper describes work-in-progress by the Pite Saami, Kola Saami and Izhva Komi language documentation projects, all of which use similar data and technical frameworks and are carried out in Freiburg and in collaboration with Hamburg, Syktyvkar, Tromsø and Uppsala. Our projects work in the endangered language documentation framework and record ne...