Digital Language Resources for Albanian

Altalbanische Schriftkultur - aus der Perspektive der historischen Lexikographie und der Philologie der Gegenwart - Akten der 6. deutsch-albanischen kultur­wissenschaftlichen Tagung (27. September 2019, Buçimas bei Pogradec, Albanien), 2020

The article describes the attempt of the authors to compile an annotated corpus of texts written in the Albanian language before 1840's. This corpus makes part of the Albanian National Corpus (ANC). We tell about our practical experience of digitization and morphological annotation of an early Albanian text, "E mbsuame e krështerë" (1592), written by Luca Matranga. We also test and demonstrate the possibilities of the corpus-aided approach to this text, taken as such and in comparison with the contemporary texts of the Corpus written in the modern Standard Albanian, and discuss the usage of this approach for the study of the Albanian historical grammar and lexicon.

SEEU Review, 2021

An important element of Natural Language Processing is parts of speech tagging. With fine-grained word-class annotations, the word forms in a text can be enhanced and can also be used in downstream processes, such as dependency parsing. The improved search options that tagged data offers also greatly benefit linguists and lexicographers. Natural language processing research is becoming increasingly popular and important as unsupervised learning methods are developed. There are some aspects of the Albanian language that make the creation of a part-of-speech tag set challenging. This research provides a discussion of those issues linguistic phenomena and presents a proposal for a part-of-speech tag set that can adequately represent them. The corpus contains more than 250,000 tokens, each annotated with a medium-sized tag set. The Albanian language’s syntagmatic aspects are adequately represented. Additionally, in this paper are morphologically and part-of-speech tagged corpora for the...

2020

In this paper, we introduce the first Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for standard Albanian, consisting of 60 sentences collected from the Albanian Wikipedia, annotated with lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, morphological features and syntactic dependencies. In addition to presenting the treebank itself, we discuss a selection of linguistic constructions in Albanian whose analysis in UD is not self-evident, including core arguments and the status of indirect objects, pronominal clitics, genitive constructions, prearticulated adjectives, and modal verbs.

2019

The presented paper describes the collecting of data from different sources to build a collocation data set with the aim of compiling the first contemporary collocation dictionary for the Albanian language. The work is based (1) on the analysis of empirical data, i. e. linguistic corpora, using the computational methods and tools, as well as (2) on traditional dictionaries. As empirical data we use the AlCo (Albanian Text Corpus), the AlCoPress 2017-2019, N- Grams extracted from both, methods like Log-likelihood and Dice coefficient using the IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) and the Corpus Query Processor, Web version (CQPweb). Despite the enormous support, an unsupervised automated compilation of a collocation dictionary of high quality, like those created by lexicographers, seems to be impossible without intervention. In order to complete the collection of the data we additionally use lexical information extracted from traditional dictionaries. The primary goal is to create a langu...

2021

The Albanian language is one of the oldest languages in the Balkans, however was documented very late, around the 15th century. The Albanian language is part of the trunk of Indo-European languages. The oldest language of this trunk is the Sanskrit language. The main and greatest writers of the time, the authors who made the first attempts to study the structure of the grammar of the Albanian language were: Lekë Matrënga, Pjetër Budi, Frank Bardhi and Pjetër Bogdani. The aim of this paper is to highlight the lexicon of old Albanian authors. Our main goal is the realization of the lexical results of the selected authors.

European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 2014

The aim of this study is to point out similarities and differences of English and Albanian language in the morphological level, trying to compare different parts of speech of both languages. Many languages do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs or adjectives and names etc, i.e. the Albanian language differs in terms of gender and plural adjectives, while English has not such a feature. Therefore formal distinctions between parts of speech should be done within the framework of a given language and should not be applied in other languages .In this study we have analyzed nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjective structures, the use of articles, pronouns etc. in Albanian and English. In the light of modern linguistics, comparative method plays an important role in the acquisition of languages comparing the first language with the target language. Comparative method is also considered as a key factor in the scientific research of modern linguistics, so it can be used successfully in teaching.

Frontiers in Communication, 2022

This paper investigates the impact of English on the Albanian language, a language contact phenomenon hitherto largely unexamined by Albanian and non-Albanian linguists alike. This contact mainly started as an indirect one at the beginning of the twentieth century, primarily via translations, the establishment of several educational institutions with the support of American and British associations and Albanian immigration into English-speaking countries. Several newspapers introduced a considerable number of Anglicisms into Albanian during the first half of the twentieth century, a good quantity of which "survived" even during the communist years of isolation. Those Anglicisms which made their way into the Albanian language until the 1990s and which have established themselves in the Albanian of today are mainly from the domains of culture and sports. The fall of the communist regime exposed the Albanian language to external linguistic and social factors, bringing about a flood of Anglicisms in different lexical fields other than culture and sport, such as business, information technology, politics, and medicine. The current database of Anglicisms in Albanian used for the purpose of this Brief Research Report was collected in the framework of the GLAD (Global Anglicism Database Network) project, . It includes 1,895 Anglicisms from newspapers and dictionaries, all integrated in a single file. The report first provides background information regarding the growing impact of English on the Albanian language during the three time periods under review (early twentieth century until 1960, 1960 to 1990, and 1990 to the present day). This is followed by an account of the data and the methods applied in the research. Subsequently, the findings and results are presented and discussed from a morphological, lexical, and syntactical perspective. The final outcomes are then used as a basis for the identification of Albanian language structures or patterns the English borrowings have managed to penetrate as well as of the level of adaptation English borrowings have in Albanian.

ArXiv, 2019

In this paper, we present the first publicly available part-of-speech and morphologically tagged corpus for the Albanian language, as well as a neural morphological tagger and lemmatizer trained on it. There is currently a lack of available NLP resources for Albanian, and its complex grammar and morphology present challenges to their development. We have created an Albanian part-of-speech corpus based on the Universal Dependencies schema for morphological annotation, containing about 118,000 tokens of naturally occuring text collected from different text sources, with an addition of 67,000 tokens of artificially created simple sentences used only in training. On this corpus, we subsequently train and evaluate segmentation, morphological tagging and lemmatization models, using the Turku Neural Parser Pipeline. On the held-out evaluation set, the model achieves 92.74% accuracy on part-of-speech tagging, 85.31% on morphological tagging, and 89.95% on lemmatization. The manually annotat...

Journal of Language Modelling, 2012

Keywords: corpus design, Bulgarian National Corpus, computational linguistics Journal of Language Modelling Vol 0, No 1 (2012), pp. 65-110 [ 66 ]

International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), 2022

Due to its wide applicability, natural language processing (NLP) has attracted significant research efforts to the machine learning and deep learning research community. Despite this, research works investigating NLP for the Albanian language are still limited. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no literature review available, which presents a clear picture of what has been studied, argued, and established in the area. The main objective of this survey is to comprehensively review, analyze and discuss the state-of-the-art in NLP for the Albanian language. Here, we present an extensive study concerning the contribution of several authors that have contributed to the application of NLP to the Albanian language. Also, we present an overview of research carried out in the typical applications of NLP for the Albanian language. Finally, some future challenges and limitations of the area are discussed.