Uyghur Language Research Articles

Kaşgar dan Doğu Türkçesi Şiirler [Çeviriyazı - Aktarma - Söz Varlığı - Tıpkıbasım

The poems represented in this study under the title as “Eastern Turki Poems from Kashgar” constitute the main subject of this study. The poems on which no academical study conducted by now are kept in Sweden in the Library of Lund University. Swedish Turkologist Gunnar V. Jarring recorded in his catalogue that poems were written in Uighur language and defined the poems as “Popular Eastern Turki Poems”. Actually poems are consisted of 2 folios and they were copied in 1908 in Kashgar probably from a manuscript of a collected literary works or the original poetry folios. As is known, Chaghatai Turkic became a classical common literal language in the 15th century via Ali Sir Nevāyī’s works among the Turkic nations excluding Ottomans, but towards the 20th century, dominant character of Nevāyī’s Chaghatai decreased little by little in the Eastern Turki literature and also varied with some features of other Turkic dialects because of the effects of local speech in different regions. According to the linguistic results of this paper, the Eastern Turki poems, that is to say, the research subject, belong to the “Post-classical period of Chaghatai Turkic” and they are certainly the literal works of 18th or 19th century. In the view of this information, the poems are analyzed from the perspective of a philological methodology in the study. Firstly a transcription of the poems in Latin alphabet, secondly the translation of the poems into Standard Turkey Turkish and thirdly a glossary in which a list of words containing the morphological and etymological data are presented in comformity with the mentioned methodology. Additionally, the original facsimile of the poems in Arabic script is presented at the end.

Text Filtering through Multi-Pattern Matching: A Case Study of Wu–Manber–Uy on the Language of Uyghur

Given its generality in applications and its high time-efficiency on big data-sets, in recent years, the technique of text filtering through pattern matching has been attracting increasing attention from the field of information retrieval and Natural language Processing (NLP) research communities at large. That being the case, however, it has yet to be seen how this technique and its algorithms, (e.g., Wu–Manber, which is also considered in this paper) can be applied and adopted properly and effectively to Uyghur, a low-resource language that is mostly spoken by the ethnic Uyghur group with a population of more than eleven-million in Xinjiang, China. We observe that technically, the challenge is mainly caused by two factors: (1) Vowel weakening and (2) mismatching in semantics between affixes and stems. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose Wu–Manber–Uy, a variant of an improvement to Wu–Manber, dedicated particularly for working on the Uyghur language. Wu–Manber–Uy implements a stem deformation-based pattern expansion strategy, specifically for reducing the mismatching of patterns caused by vowel weakening and spelling errors. A two-way strategy that applies invigilation and control on the change of lexical meaning of stems during word-building is also used in Wu–Manber–Uy. Extra consideration with respect to Word2vec and the dictionary are incorporated into the system for processing Uyghur. The experimental results we have obtained consistently demonstrate the high performance of Wu–Manber–Uy.

The Uighur Word Materials in a Manuscript of Huá-yí-yì-yǔ (華夷譯語) in the Library of Seoul National University (V) — 天文門 tianwenmen ‘the category of astronomy’ —

AbstractThe Huá-yí-yì-yǔ is a general name for the various wordbooks between the Chinese language and its neighbouring languages compiled from the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It has broadly 4 different classes. In the wordbooks of the third class the words of each foreign language were transliterated only in Chinese characters and the letters of the language in question were not used. To this third class belongs the manuscript in the collection of the library of Seoul National University. Its seventh volume is for the Uighur language. It contains 19 categories. In this paper the first category of astronomy with 85 entries is treated.There are many scribal errors in these materials. Apart from the shortcomings of the Chinese characters, this may be the main reason why the Uighur word materials in the wordbooks of this class are not highly regarded.

Uyghur short-text classification based on reliable sub-word morphology

In this paper, we research some short-text classification methods for a low resource language combined with reliable stemming and term extraction methods. Uyghur is a morphologically rich agglutinative language in which words are formed by a stem attached by several suffixes, and this property causes infinite vocabulary in theory. As the stems are the semantic entities, stem based text classification is the promising way for the low resource morphologically derivative languages. And it is also an efficient way in NLP to extract and predict out-of-vocabulary (OOV) and misspellings based on context information. The word (or stem) - vector-based morphological analysis incorporating stem-vector to text classification is a novel approach for the Uyghur language. Our stemming method extracts noisy stems robustly and decrease the particle lexicon to 1/3 of word lexicon and improve the coverage, thus suited for small corpora with high OOV rate resources. And the highest accuracy of 93.5% is obtained in nine categories of short texts based on stem-vector with CHI-2 (x2) feature.

Xakani Language and Its Place on Uygur Language History

The grammatical and morphological features of the Turkish language are exactly same in the Old Uyghur and Xakani languages. There can be a lot of information about Uyghur language in Dīvānu Luγāti’t-Türk. These will be discussed in the article.

Effective Uyghur Language Text Detection in Complex Background Images for Traffic Prompt Identification

Text detection in complex background images is a challenging task for intelligent vehicles. Actually, almost all the widely-used systems focus on commonly used languages while for some minority languages, such as the Uyghur language, text detection is paid less attention. In this paper, we propose an effective Uyghur language text detection system in complex background images. First, a new channel-enhanced maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) algorithm is put forward to detect component candidates. Second, a two-layer filtering mechanism is designed to remove most non-character regions. Third, the remaining component regions are connected into short chains, and the short chains are extended by a novel extension algorithm to connect the missed MSERs. Finally, a two-layer chain elimination filter is proposed to prune the non-text chains. To evaluate the system, we build a new data set by various Uyghur texts with complex backgrounds. Extensive experimental comparisons show that our system is obviously effective for Uyghur language text detection in complex background images. The F-measure is 85%, which is much better than the state-of-the-art performance of 75.5%.

Morphological structure influences the initial landing position in words during reading Finnish.

The preferred viewing location in words [Rayner, K. (1979). Eye guidance in reading: Fixation locations within words. Perception, 8, 21-30] during reading is near the word centre. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study by Yan and colleagues [Yan, M., Zhou, W., Shu, H., Yusupu, R., Miao, D., Krügel, A., & Kliegl, R. (2014). Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language. Cognition, 132, 181-215] demonstrated that the word's morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich language, Uighur. The present study aimed at replicating their main findings in another morphologically rich language, Finnish. Similarly to Yan et al., it was found that the initial fixation landed closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex than for monomorphemic words. Word frequency, saccade launch site, and word length were also found to influence the initial landing position. It is concluded that in addition to low-level factors (word length and saccade launch site), also higher level factors related to the word's morphological structure and frequency may be utilized in saccade programming during reading.

Between Resistance and Adaptation

The urban areas of Xinjiang have recently experienced major changes in their demographic, urban, ethnic, and linguistic landscapes. Urumchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a typical example of this. In this city, which is undergoing rapid economic and urban expansion, the Han make up around 72% of the population and the Chinese language is ever more present in the language use of the Uyghurs. This study examines the place of the Uyghur language in the context of the sinicisation of the city of Urumchi, its role in the daily life of the Uyghur community, and opportunities for its use and revitalisation.

Language ideologies in a Uyghur comedy sketch: the comedy sketch Chüshenmidim ‘I don’t understand’ and the importance of Sap Uyghur

AbstractUyghur, a Turkic language spoken mostly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, is at present undergoing changes in usage. The spread of Standard Chinese promoted by the national government and the growing Han population are contributing to the Sinicization of Uyghur and shaping new language practices. Language-related issues are therefore a common topic in the Uyghur community, in intellectual discourse as well as in daily conversation. This article analyses a Uyghur comedy sketch entitled

Acoustic features of the plosives of Uyghur speakers with velopharyngeal insufficiency

Objective To analyze the acoustic features of plosive consonants in Uyghur as spoken by persons with post-palatoplasty velopharyngeal insufficiency. Methods Thirty-one Uyghur-speaking children without a speech disorder were selected as a control group, while 28 others with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) formed the VPI group. All were recorded speaking 9 Uyghur words which contain the plosive consonants /b/, /d/ and /g/. The consonants′ duration (CD), amplitude (CA), their first formants (VF1), second formants (VF2), third formants (VF3) and fourth formants (VF4) as voiced as well as the voice onset time (VOT) were measured and analyzed using the PRAAT software for the two groups. Results The VF1, VF3 and VF4 of the plosive consonant /b/ were significantly lower for those in the VPI group than among the controls, and the CD of /b/ was significantly longer. There were also significant differences between the two groups in terms of the VF1s, VF3s and CDs of the other plosive consonants. The VOTs of the consonant /b/, /d/ and /g/ were (0.12±0.05)s, (0.10±0.03)s and (0.09±0.03)s, respectively, with an occurrence rate of up to 100% in the control group, significantly different from those in the VPI group (P<0.05). Conclusion The acoustic features of the three plosive consonants /b/, /d/ and /g/ can distinguish Uyghur-speaking children with velopharyngeal insufficiency from those with normal speech. Key words: Velopharyngeal insufficiency; Plosive consonants; Uyghur language; Speech corpuses; Acoustic features

The Internet as a tool for informal education: a case of Uyghur language websites

The 200th year since Jullien published his influential book Esquisse et vues preliminaries d’un ouvrage sur l’éducation comparée (Preliminary plan and views of a work of comparative education) is an opportunity to reflect on the field of comparative education and potential new research and theoretical directions. This paper will consider the potential role of information and communication technologies in comparative education scholarship within the context of Jullien’s plan for comparative education. Specifically, it uses the example of interactive Uyghur language websites to highlight their value as a vehicle for informal education, and how an understanding of cultural context, illuminated by an analysis of the content of social media messages, may contribute to more appropriate and successful educational policies for minority populations. Data for this paper are drawn from posts from the online community forums (munbar) of four popular Uyghur language websites.

Name recognition in the Uyghur language based on fuzzy matching and syllable-character conversion

Name recognition in the Uyghur language based on fuzzy matching and syllable-character conversion

UYGURCA SÖZCÜKLER VE GELİŞMESİ

In contemporary Uyghur language, though Uyghur or other Turkic origin words have majority in percentage, still adopted words from other languages have effects that cannot be neglected. The usage of adopted words is increasing continuously. Reasons of these situations are, cannot be created new Uyghur words that describe contemporary life or satisfy modern Uyghur literature perfectly. Instead of creating new words, some foreign words have been translated into Uyghur language. Because of some translated words not effective or usable, people prefer to use more effective or short foreign words directly. Uyghurs live in the Sinkiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China and Turkic republics in the Central Asia mainly. Except these, Uyghur live in Turkey, Europe, USA and Australia. Therefore, many words accepted into Uyghur language. Uyghurs live in different regions in the world and prefer to use local language with Uyghur language together. Because of this reason, there are many adapted words began to be used in contemporary Uyghur language even those words have the same meaning. In this article, adapted words analyzed in Uyghur language and some efforts about creating new words explained briefly

A Semisupervised Tag-Transition-Based Markovian Model for Uyghur Morphology Analysis

Morphological analysis, which includes analysis of part-of-speech (POS) tagging, stemming, and morpheme segmentation, is one of the key components in natural language processing (NLP), particularly for agglutinative languages. In this article, we investigate the morphological analysis of the Uyghur language, which is the native language of the people in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region of western China. Morphological analysis of Uyghur is challenging primarily because of factors such as (1) ambiguities arising due to the likelihood of association of a multiple number of POS tags with a word stem or a multiple number of functional tags with a word suffix, (2) ambiguous morpheme boundaries, and (3) complex morphopholonogy of the language. Further, the unavailability of a manually annotated training set in the Uyghur language for the purpose of word segmentation makes Uyghur morphological analysis more difficult. In our proposed work, we address these challenges by undertaking a semisupervised approach of learning a Markov model with the help of a manually constructed dictionary of “suffix to tag” mappings in order to predict the most likely tag transitions in the Uyghur morpheme sequence. Due to the linguistic characteristics of Uyghur, we incorporate a prior belief in our model for favoring word segmentations with a lower number of morpheme units. Empirical evaluation of our proposed model shows an accuracy of about 82%. We further improve the effectiveness of the tag transition model with an active learning paradigm. In particular, we manually investigated a subset of words for which the model prediction ambiguity was within the top 20%. Manually incorporating rules to handle these erroneous cases resulted in an overall accuracy of 93.81%.

Community Cultural Wealth: Uyghurs, Social Networks, and Education

ABSTRACTThis article employs Yosso’s framework of ‘community cultural wealth’ to explore the ways in which educated Uyghurs, one of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, build on social networks like family and friends to improve their own social standing and contribute to the benefit of their communities. Through Yosso’s lens, ethnic minorities have their own cultural capital, which is distinct from the dominant group, and which can also be maximized to garner a successful status within society. This study undertook to discover: (a) In what ways do Uyghurs draw from their own community resources to navigate within a Mandarin Chinese-dominant education and economic system? (b) In what ways do Uyghurs support others within their own community for success? The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork collected within Xinjiang during the fall of 2013, interviews conducted with educated Uyghurs in Xinjiang and eastern China during multiple visits between the years of 2010-2013, and an analysis of interactive Uyghur language websites during the Spring of 2014.

The Intonation Pattern of Imperative Sentences in Uyghur Language

Based on the notion of intonation pattern and method of undulating scale computation, this paper has done a quantitative analysis to the intonation patterns of imperative oral sentences in standard Uyghur language. And give the pitch contour distributions of representative sentences and their different tone groups for the first time. The experimental results show that whether from the contour curves of overall sentences or fluctuations of tone groups pitch contour curves and the width variations, we can observe the distinctive features between different pronunciations. And can also observe the subtle tone differences between different types of statements voiced from a same text sentence.

Research on Modern Uyghur Common Word Extraction

The key techniques and methods for the construction of modern Uyghur language (MUL) corpus are presented. The techniques and methods included MUL corpus, MUL corpus pre-processing, MUL corpus statistics, MUL stemming and MUL data analysis; on the basis of related works we then developed an enhanced modern Uyghur Common Words (UCW)-glossary. We conducted basic inspections upon the words from two perspectives namely the usage frequency and distribution. Upon developing enhanced MUCW glossary we considered the number of word types, word frequency, word length, and the number of texts used as major factors.

The Patterns of Vowels in Monosyllabic Words of Uyghur Language

In this paper, on the basis of traditional phonetics, by using the methods of experimental phonetics and voice pattern theory, Analyzed and summarized the vowel pattern of the monosyllables in Uyghur language. The statistical analysis is carried upon the vowel formant frequency values in monosyllables, and discussed by using Joos method in more details. For the first time, with the actual experimental data proves the accordance of tongue location features of Uyghur vowel with the traditional knowledge from hearsay. The research results of this paper will have a high reference value for the study and application development of both Uyghur language and the other languages are belongs Altaic language family.

Stem-Affix based Uyghur Morphological Analyzer

Uyghur language is an agglutinative language in which words are derived from stems (or roots) by concatenating suffixes. This property makes a large number of combinations of morphemes, and greatly increases the word-vocabulary size, causing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) and data sparseness problems for statistical models. So words are split into certain sub-word units and applied to text and speech processing applications. Proper sub-word units not only provide high coverage and smaller lexicon size, but also provide semantic and syntactic information which is necessary for downstream applications. This paper discusses a general purpose morphological analyzer tool which can split a text of words into sequence of morphemes or syllables. Uyghur morpheme segmentation is a basic part of the comprehensive effort of the Uyghur language corpus compilation. As there are no delimiters for sub-word units, a supervised method, combined with certain rules and a statistical learning algorithm, is applied for morpheme segmentation. For phonetic units like syllable and phonemes, pure rule-based methods can extract with high accuracy. Most common and proper sub-words for various applications can be the linguistic morphemes for they provide linguistic information, high coverage, low lexicon size, and easily be restored to words. As the Uyghur language is written as pronounced, phonetic alterations of speech are openly expressed in text. This property makes many surface forms for a particular morpheme. A general purpose morphological analyzer must be able to analyze and export in both standard and surface forms. So the morphophonetic alterations like phonetic harmony, weakening, and morphological changes are summarized and learnt from training corpus. And a statistical model based morpheme segmentation tool is trained on the corpus of aligned word-morpheme sequences, and applied to predict possible morpheme sequences. For an open test set, with word coverage of 86.8% and morpheme coverage of 98.4%, the morpheme segmentation accuracy is 97.6%. This morpheme segmentation tool can output both on the standard forms and on the surface forms without costing segmentation accuracy. Furthermore, for various basic lexical units of word, morpheme, and syllable, the statistical properties are compared as a comprehensive effort of the Uyghur language corpus compilation.

Research on Method for Uyghur temporal Word Recognition

Researches concerning to the temporal expressions in minority languages, particularly the Uyghur temporal word recognition, has not previously been conducted. this paper stated for the first time the relevant progresses and significances on domestic and overseas researches. We analyzed the formation of simple and compound temporal words in modern Uyghur language. We discussed the constitutive rule for Uyghur temporal expressions and put forward a new rule for combined temporal expression templates on the basis of dictionary and regular expressions. We then designed a suitable recognition algorithm and implemented an extraction system for the Uyghur temporal expressions. In the end, the feasibility and usability of the complete recognition method and results were discussed.