Kartu-Verbs: a Base of Inflected Forms of Georgian Verbs

Kartu-Verbs: a Base of Inflected Forms of Georgian Verbs

  • Software is available here.
    • The base is still under development. We are aware that there are some mistakes in the contents.
  • A paper describing the project : Kartu-Verbs Euralex XIX 2020 paper
  • A list of tutorials can be found on Youtube.

Contact

Mireille Ducassé, mireille.ducasse@irisa.fr

Project description

The Georgian language has a complex verbal system, both agglutinative and inflectional, with many irregularities. Inflected forms of a given verb can differ greatly from one another and it is still a controversial issue to determine which lemmas should represent a verb in dictionaries. Verb tables help people to track lemmas starting from inflected forms but these tables are tedious and error-prone to browse.

We propose Kartu-Verbs, a Semantic Web base of inflected Georgian verb forms. The Semantic Web tool, Sparklis, can retrieve information from their facets, it also allows users to smoothly refine their query by giving them suggestions. For a given verb, all its inflected forms are present. Knowledge can easily be traversed in all directions: from Georgian to French and English; from an inflected form to a masdar (a verbal noun, the form that comes closest to an infinitive), and conversely from a masdar to any inflected form; from component(s) to forms and from a form to its components. Users can easily retrieve the lemmas that are relevant to access their preferred dictionaries. Kartu-Verbs can be seen as a front-end to any Georgian dictionary, thus bypassing the lemmatization issues.

Our tool can be seen as a companion of the series of “Biliki” books by Nana Shavtvaladze (Biliki, Georgian Language For English Speakers), a nice support for English speakers to learn Georgian.

Note that we use a transliteration in Latin characters in  the system to ease non-native Georgian speakers’s reading. The transliteration is currently “French“ oriented for historical reasons. We are planning to add more transliterations.

Georgian
Sparklis a b g d e v z t i
Georgian
Sparklis k’ l m n o p’ j r s
Georgian
Sparklis t’ u p k gh q sh tch ts
Georgian
Sparklis dz ts’ tch’ kh dj h

Acknowledgment

We are thankful to Irma Grdzelidze and Tina Margalitadze from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University for providing more hindsight of this work. We are indebted to Tina for pointing out the verb lemmatization issue. Thanks to the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility program, the following Georgian students contributed to the project: Keti Meipariani, Mariam Asatiani, Mikheil Maisuradze, Tamari Kldiashvili, Tamar Sharabidze, Beka Chachua, Ana Idadze, Veriko Nikuradze, Tornike Tchanturia, Ana Elchishvili, and Aleksandre Jajanidze. We are grateful to Keti Meipariani who managed the working teams of two semesters and who remotely helps the following teams. Last but not least, we want to warmly thank Sébastien Ferré for his support to use Sparklis.

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