A natural language processing infrastructure for Turkish

Abstract

We built an open-source software platform intended to serve as a common infrastructure that can be of use in the development of new applications involving the processing of Turkish. The platform incorporates a lexicon, a morphological analyzer/generator, and a DCG parser/generator that translates Turkish sentences to predicate logic formulas, and a knowledge base framework. Several developers have already utilized the platform for a variety of applications, including conversation programs and an artificial personal assistant, tools for automatic analysis of rhyme and meter in Turkish folk poems, a prototype sentence-level translator between Albanian, Turkish, and English, natural language interfaces for generating SQL queries and Java code, as well as a text tagger used for collecting statistics about Turkish morpheme order for a speech recognition algorithm. The results indicate the adaptability of the infrastructure to different kinds of applications and how it facilitates improvements and modifications.