Re: [A12n-Collab] RE: Utilities for analyzing keyboards?

[Andrew Cunningham <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd settle for a Unicode based OCR application that you could add new 
languages to and train it for it new language, including identifying the 
alphabet for each language, punctuation and any auxiliary characters 
that may be encountered, esp. wrt to older texts.. It seems most OCR 
software doesn't lend itself to this purpose easily.

Andrew


Don Osborn wrote:

> Hi Andrew, One problem we run up against in talking about various 
> advanced applications is the issue of corpora. There is a need to find 
> ways to (1) more effectively digitize existing text, and (2) generate 
> new text. On the former (1), I would really like to see a project to 
> (a) assure that extended Latin texts already scanned for projects like 
> Google books are OCR'd properly when extended Latin and diacritics are 
> involved (I've written that particular project about that already), 
> and (b) a new/additional focused effort be undertaken to digitize all 
> extant texts in under-resourced languages. On the latter (2) , Mark 
> Liberman and colleagues at the Linguistic Data Consortium (University 
> of Pennsylvania) have an interesting project concept for involving 
> school students transcribing oral histories that then could become 
> part of local heritage resources as well as developing the corpora for 
> the languages (makes me wonder if OLPC and similar projects could be 
> involved in a pilot effort along these lines).
>  
>
> That said, and returning to the topic of analyzing keyboards: I would 
> hope that even a relatively small amount of text could in the meantime 
> give us an idea how efficient alternative keyboard layouts are. We can 
> sort of give an educated guess about what might be more advantageous 
> in one way or another of particular key arrangements, but until we can 
> begin to collect and statistically analyze basic data on keystokes, 
> etc. it is just estimates. With small texts that are probably not 
> "representative samplings" (if such a thing were possible in 
> language), there is a risk that a particular text could give a 
> misleading result. But at this stage in discussion we may be just 
> talking about beginning to get some better ideas about the efficiency 
> of alternative layouts.
>  
>
> Don
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> *From:* a12n-collaboration-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:a12n-collaboration-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Andrew 
> Cunningham
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 29, 2008 8:23 AM
> *To:* Tunde Adegbola
> *Cc:* keyboards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; 'A12n tech support'; Don Osborn; 
> 'Indigenous Languages and Technology'
> *Subject:* [A12n-Collab] Re: [PALNet-general] Utilities for analyzing 
> keyboards?
>  
>
> Don,
>
> your second tool would necessitate having a large corpus in each 
> language to use for the analysis.
> as a quick experiment, i thought I'd look at some character 
> frequencies in a single text, just an experiment, since a single text 
> couldn't be considered adequate for a proper analysis.
> Since the draft Yoruba keyboard layout uses combining diacritics for 
> all the diacritics, I took the Yoruba translation of the UDHR. Then 
> normalised the text using NFD. I then ran it through a script to count 
> the occurrence of each character.
> Of the four most frequent characters, three were the combining 
> diacritics: acute, grave and dot-below. Although a single text is 
> inconclusive, it is suggestive that for Yoruba the combining 
> diacritics need to be typed frequently and should be in positions 
> allowing them to be typed easily and quickly.
> And yes, i converted the vertical line below to a dot below before 
> running the test on the UDHR translation.
> Andrew
> --
> Andrew Cunningham
> Research and Development Coordinator
> Vicnet
> State Library of Victoria
> Australia
>
> andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
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--
Andrew Cunningham
Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000

Ph: +61-3-8664-7430
Fax: +61-3-9639-2175

Email: andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alt email: lang.support@xxxxxxxxx

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/
http://www.openroad.net.au
http://www.vicnet.net.au
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au

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