Apertium-tat, a morphological transducer and Constraint Grammar-based tagger for Tatar

1 Rarely Asked Questions

1.1 How do I force an irregular stem to take front/back vowel endings?

For a stem in apertium-tat.tat.lexc file, add {ъ} (i.e. lowercase Cyrillic ‘hard sign’ in curly braces, which have to be escaped in HFST/LEXC) to the right-hand side of the entry if that stem should take back vowel endings, e.g.:

төньяк:төньяк%{ъ%}

көньяк:көньяк%{ъ%}

The lowercase Cyrillic ‘soft sign’ {ь} triggers front vowel harmony:

бәла:бәла%{ь%}

This two signs are only necessary for irregular words when you see that phonological rules from the TWOL file don’t work ‘out-of-the box’ for the word in question.

A major execption are abbreviations. It might be necessary to add either of these two marks to most of them.

СССР:СССР%{ъ%} ABBR ; ! "USSR"

1.2 In "apertium-tat.tat.lexc", what do marks Err/Orth, Dir/LR, Dir/RL and Use/Arch mean?