Linguistics Institute

Projects

Academic Year 2022 (June 2022 - May 2023)

Cambodia Software Support and Language Forge Demonstration Trip

17-21 October 2022

Staff: Scott Dysart, Christopher Hirt, Royce Flaming, Lainey Miller

We visited language development partners in Cambodia and provided support for users of SIL’s Fieldworks. Additionally, while in Ratanakiri,

we demonstrated SIL’s Language Forge to partners in International Cooperation Cambodia (ICC). We also demonstrated it to the Royal Academy of Cambodia (RAC) and discussed ways that we could assist the RAC in their efforts to create a new Khmer Dictionary.

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Language Forge Dictionary Collaboration Software Development

June 2022 - Ongoing

Staff: Christopher Hirt, Lainey Miller, Kevin Hahn, Joseph Myers, Robin Munn

Language Forge development continues to move forward at a steady pace. We now have 1000 language projects hosted on languageforge.org. Over the fall term, we released several new versions of Language Forge with various improvements. See our release page for full details.

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Rebuild of LanguageForge.org Platform

June 2022 - Ongoing

Staff: Kevin Hahn, Robin Munn

LanguageForge.org (https://languageforge.org) is an SIL Lexicography tool developed and maintained by staff at Payap University’s Linguistics Institute. This is a web-based platform designed to enable community engagement in an effort to increase language documentation and development. It has become necessary to rebuild the platform to be more efficient with today’s technologies and to better integrate with SIL’s FieldWorks Explorer.

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Continuing Development on Keyman for Android

June 2022 - Ongoing

Staff: Darcy Wong

The Keyman team released Keyman 15.0 in June 2022 and upgraded to release 16.0 in December 2022. One new feature in Keyman for Android is giving the users the option for haptic feedback where the Keyman keyboard vibrates on each key press. Also, one of the bug-fixes was fixing the maximum keyboard height so it is usable in landscape orientation.

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LI YouTube Channel

June 2022 – Ongoing

Members: Scott Dysart, Elizabeth Pfeifer

We continue to produce training videos that are uploaded to the LI’s YouTube channel. This has enabled us to demonstrate various software tools to a broader audience than would be possible if we limited ourselves to only those in front of us. Google analytics show that we had more than 10,000 views from June 2022 through May 2023.

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Bloom Software Training

August – November 2022

Staff: Elizabeth Pfeifer, Scott Dysart

Training sessions covering SIL’s Bloom software were conducted in-person and online. The in-person sessions were held at the Linguistics Institute 22-23 August 2022 and were attended by six participants from the Linguistics Institute, SIL Mainland South East Asia group, and partner organizations. The training was repeated online on 26 October (session 1) and 1 November 2022 (session 2) with a total of 27 participants joining one or both sessions. The online training allowed participants from different areas within Asia-Pacific to join. The recordings from the online training were uploaded to the LI’s YouTube channel.

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PTXPrint Training Session During EMDC

19 - 22 May 2023

Staff: Martin Hosken

Martin led a four-day workshop on using PTXPrint for quick draft printing.

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Migrate Keyman Websites

June 2022 - Ongoing

Staff: Darcy Wong, Tim Eves

Keyman had several websites hosted on Windows servers which no longer supported the version of PHP as of the end of 2022. Darcy and Tim worked on migrating the staging site of https://help.keyman-staging.com to a Linux server using Docker and Kubernetes technologies. The plan is to continue migrating the other Keyman websites in a similar way.

Academic Year 2021 (June 2021 - May 2022)

Scripture Forge v3.8 Release

July-November 2021

Staff: Ira Hopkinson and Damien Daspit

Scripture Forge continues to be a major project in which Linguistics Institute personnel are involved. We have moved from v3.5 through to v3.8: see our version releases. We have also done a number of field trials in several languages for the Translation Suggestions feature which incorporates AI techniques to aid in translation. This has given useful and encouraging feedback, and we have made a number of improvements as a result.

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Keyman Project (Ongoing)

Keyman is a software that makes it possible for users to type in over 2000 languages on Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and phones, and even instantly in their web browser.

Keyman software team planning meeting

14-18 February 2022

Staff: Darcy Wong

Darcy joined this planning meeting for a week at the National Polytechnic Institute of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The team updated the Keyman strategic roadmap to help prioritize upcoming features and fixes so Keyman can better serve its primary users of language communities who have no alternative keyboards available to type their language.

Keyman 15 for Android alpha pre-release

July - November, 2021

Staff: Darcy Wong

New features added in Keyman app help users quickly switch to their desired keyboard. Now there is a distinction between a short-press on the globe key button with a long-press. A short-press on the key will quickly switch to the next Keyman keyboard. A long-press on the key will display a “Keyboard picker” menu, which shows a list of Keyman keyboards, followed by a list of other Android input method extensions (IME’s).

Language Forge Project

June 2021- Ongoing

Staff: Christopher Hirt, Robin Munn, Joseph Myers

Work continues on Language Forge. Language Forge is a web app that enables language documentation and dictionary creation over the internet. This enables broader group participation, both in the number of individuals who can engage as well as the devices that can be used. The team is currently working on ‘behind the scene’ improvements to Language Forge that will increase its ability to be more cross platform and compliant with current Internet app standards.

The software had some feature enhancements on searching, display of search results, and the navigation of records in December 2021. The software team made a walk-through presentation of the Language forge posted on our LI Youtube video channel.

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Khmer Encoding

June 2021 – Ongoing

Staff: Martin Hosken

The Unicode encoding of Khmer has had many problems over the years. The current issue is that there are multiple ways to type what is intended to be the same visual representation. This results in words not being searchable across different documents, confusion, and other issues. Martin wrote a document that addresses these issues which is currently being reviewed by governmental experts in Cambodia and by the Unicode Technical Committee.

Link to the document: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21241-khmer-structure.pdf

In consultation with Martin, SIL’s Cambodia team presented a symposium describing the problem with the National Polytechnic Institute of Cambodia.

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Linguistics Institute YouTube Channel (Ongoing)

Staff: Christopher Hirt, Scott Dysart, Royce Flaming

Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSvV5XKurMNEf23nlKH4SuQ

Our Linguistics Institute YouTube Channel contains helpful demonstrations, tutorials and updates about linguistic software that we support and develop, and software that we use for various tasks. Our YouTube channel will continue to grow in the coming months and years as we develop more training content. Some of the presentations from the last year are:

Language Forge new releases (v.1.8 - v1.10) Highlights

Introduction to Keyman User Testing Bot

We continue to produce training videos that are uploaded to the LI’s Youtube channel. This has enabled us to demonstrate the various software tools to a broader audience than would be possible if we limited ourselves to those in front of us. For example, in the 90 days period from 24 Feb to 24 May we have had 1,567 total views, 90.7 total watch hours, and an additional 20 subscribers.

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Northern Thai Android Scripture App

October - November 2021

Staff: Carter Spears, Roger Green (Northern Training Unit)

Roger and Carter updated the Northern Thai Android Scripture app. Updates include the ability to create Scripture graphics and also Scripture videos with the Scripture text and audio. The app also now has the Mark LUMO film (a chronological filming of the Gospels in Bible) in Northern Thai. The app was built using the Scripture App Builder program and has been published to the Google Play Store.

Academic Year 2016 (June 2015 - June 2016)

Feasibility study in collision avoidance in Graphite (TX 19)
Collision avoidance is the process of ensuring that glyph elements in neighbouring glyphs, that should not collide are stopped from doing so. View the full report for additional details.

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Khmer Script Line Breaking
Line breaking is a two stage process. First, possible line break opportunities are identified in a string, then one of these is chosen as the point at which the line is broken into two strings. Line breaking, ideally, occurs at word boundaries. This paper will consider the most prevalent open source line breaking algorithm used for Khmer script text, and that is provided in the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library, made available by IBM. View the full paper for additional details.

Academic Year 2012 (June 2012 - May 2013)

Language Forge Prototype (CU 15)
Increasingly many language workers are able to access the internet on a regular basis. An emerging trend is that internet oriented software provides a platform for users to collaborate. This project produced a prototype 'dictionary editor' that enables users to work together to build a dictionary database. This prototype was completed in May 2013.

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LanguageForge Chorus Integration (CU 16)
The up-and-coming LanguageForge internet service exists primarily to enable collaboration of language data among among the internet using community. Unfortunately, many of our users aren't able to be connected to the internet and as such using the LanguageForge online dictionary editor is not possible. Integrating and connecting the Chorus collaboration software (the result of projects of previous years) to the LanguageForge server allows offline users to be able to collaborate with the rest of the online language data ecosystem. A prototype of this system was completed in February 2013.

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WeSay 1.3 (CU 17)
WeSay is a lexicography tool used by language projects around the world. These projects benefit from new features and bug fixes made to WeSay. Two WeSay enhancements were completed this year.
WeSay 1.3 incorporates some of the most needed new features and address some of the issues found in older versions. One of the most needed improvements to WeSay is a feature that allows resuming of interrupted send/receive transaction. This feature is crucial in areas with low quality internet connections. Further improvements were made to WeSay's input systems management, allowing users to delete input systems while preserving existing data found in the database. An new user help system has also been included.

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WeSay 1.4 (CU 18)
WeSay 1.4 focused on user interface improvement. First it was reported that the list views used in a number of WeSay tasks select an item other than the one that was clicked in certain situations. This behavior was particularly confusing to WeSay's primary target audience which is those with limited computer skills. Secondly users requested an improved user interface for deleting senses in the “Dictionary browse and edit” task. We also improved WeSay's ability to limit words shown in the “Missing info” tasks. Underlying these changes was also a shift to the .Net 4 client framework which reduced the amount of third party downloads necessary to run Wesay and bring Wesay in line with the development of other linguistic tools.

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Video Conference technologies for Distributed Conferences (CU 19)
The cost of travel, and time away from work and family is a significant cost, and barrier to attendance at conferences. This limits the sharing of knowledge. This project explores current technologies that are freely available and assesses their fitness for use in hosting a distributed 'virtual' conference.

Technology is assessed and reviewed.
Social factors will be explored, and experimented with.
A actual conference will be run, using the technology and social factors.

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ScriptureForge (CU 20)
Translation of large documents is a complex and time consuming task. The translation is typically performed by a core team working closely together. This project explores the possibilities of accelerating the translation task, not by getting more people involved in translation per se, but rather involving others in the tasks that suit their skill and their profile. Thereby freeing up the core translation team to focus more on translation.
Specifically this project aims to produce a website to facilitate the community checking phase of a translation project. Target outcomes are:

That community users from outside the core translation team will engage in the community checking phase of the translation.
That feedback will be swiftly made available to the core translation team.

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AngularJS Training (CU 21)
In recent software projects (SD20 ScriptureForge) the software development team have used modern web technologies, such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript; specifically AngularJS to produce a web application.
This project aims to share this knowledge gained with others that may benefit from this experience. Our target audience is other faculty and students within the university, and also attendees from the wider community in Chiangmai.