Local-grammar Based approach to the recognition of variants of Loanwords

Poster Session

Frej, Mohamed. Student, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea

Title: Local-grammar Based approach to the recognition of variants of Loanwords

Abstract: Many studies have investigated the role Loanwords play in second language learning. While English loanwords can be considered as an effective tool in teaching Korean to speakers of other languages, there are some problems connected with the variation of the spelling of English Loanwords. Even though there is an official norm imposed by the Korean government about the transliteration of loanwords in Korean, we observe people use, especially in internet documents, many variants of the standard spelling of loanwords. The variant spellings of loanwords are idiosyncratic phenomena that are problematic not only for natural language processing applications, but also for second language learners who get confused about the right spelling of a given loanword. This would hamper their second language learning process. In this paper, to account for this problem, we propose a finite-state methodology named Local-Grammar Graph (LGG) to describe and recognize these various spellings of loanwords. Local grammar graphs consist of two parts; the input and the output. We describe all possible variations in input paths to assign them into a standard spelling of the word in output path of the finite-state graph. One example of those graphs is the following: [graph provided at exhibit].

This graph can be used to describe and recognize all the possible variants of the loanword 파운데이션. It exactly accounts for 32 forms of the same word. Therefore, LGGs are definitely more effective and less time-consuming than having to describe those variations one by one in a list form. Unitex system (Paumier 2003) which has been developed to transform the LGGs into finite-state transducers, to be integrated in E-learning systems, will offer an adequate environment for this work. Finally, the methodology we present here may be applied on other languages.

References

Cheon, S.-M. (2008). A study of English Loanwords In Korean. Seoul: KSi. ISBN 978-89-534-7946-3

Gross, Maurice. (1997) the Construction of Local Grammars. In Finite-State Language Processing, E. Roche & Y. Schabès (eds.), Language, Speech, and Communication, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pages 329-354

Nam J. S. & Choi, K. S. 1997. Local-grammar based approach to proper noun recognition. Beijing.