Fineen Davis


2024

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Gramble: A Tabular Programming Language for Collaborative Linguistic Modeling
Patrick Littell | Darlene Stewart | Fineen Davis | Aidan Pine | Roland Kuhn
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

We introduce Gramble, a domain-specific programming language for linguistic parsing and generation, in the tradition of XFST, TWOLC, and Kleene. Gramble features an intuitive tabular syntax and supports live group programming, allowing community experts to participate more directly in system development without having to be programmers themselves. A cross-platform interpreter is available for Windows, MacOS, and UNIX, supports collaborative programming on the web via Google Sheets, and is released open-source under the MIT license.

2022

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Gi2Pi Rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme transformations
Aidan Pine | Patrick William Littell | Eric Joanis | David Huggins-Daines | Christopher Cox | Fineen Davis | Eddie Antonio Santos | Shankhalika Srikanth | Delasie Torkornoo | Sabrina Yu
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

This paper describes the motivation and implementation details for a rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme engine ‘Gi2Pi' implemented in pure Python and released under the open source MIT license. The engine and interface have been designed to prioritize the developer experience of potential contributors without requiring a high level of programming knowledge. ‘Gi2Pi' already provides mappings for 30 (mostly Indigenous) languages, and the package is accompanied by a web-based interactive development environment, a RESTful API, and extensive documentation to encourage the addition of more mappings in the future. We also present three downstream applications of ‘Gi2Pi' and show results of a preliminary evaluation.

2021

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On the Computational Modelling of Michif Verbal Morphology
Fineen Davis | Eddie Antonio Santos | Heather Souter
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

This paper presents a finite-state computational model of the verbal morphology of Michif. Michif, the official language of the Métis peoples, is a uniquely mixed language with Algonquian and French origins. It is spoken across the Métis homelands in what is now called Canada and the United States, but it is highly endangered with less than 100 speakers. The verbal morphology is remarkably complex, as the already polysynthetic Algonquian patterns are combined with French elements and unique morpho-phonological interactions. The model presented in this paper, LI VERB KAA-OOSHITAHK DI MICHIF handles this complexity by using a series of composed finite-state transducers to model the concatenative morphology and phonological rule alternations that are unique to Michif. Such a rule-based approach is necessary as there is insufficient language data for an approach that uses machine learning. A language model such as LI VERB KAA-OOSHITAHK DI MICHIF furthers the goals of Indigenous computational linguistics in Canada while also supporting the creation of tools for documentation, education, and revitalization that are desired by the Métis community.

2020

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The Indigenous Languages Technology project at NRC Canada: An empowerment-oriented approach to developing language software
Roland Kuhn | Fineen Davis | Alain Désilets | Eric Joanis | Anna Kazantseva | Rebecca Knowles | Patrick Littell | Delaney Lothian | Aidan Pine | Caroline Running Wolf | Eddie Santos | Darlene Stewart | Gilles Boulianne | Vishwa Gupta | Brian Maracle Owennatékha | Akwiratékha’ Martin | Christopher Cox | Marie-Odile Junker | Olivia Sammons | Delasie Torkornoo | Nathan Thanyehténhas Brinklow | Sara Child | Benoît Farley | David Huggins-Daines | Daisy Rosenblum | Heather Souter
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.