Re: [Indic-computing-devel] Regexp and Indian languages ?

[Krishnamurthy N. <kn...@ya...>]

Hi Arun,

Perhaps you could take a look at the generic
transliteration library for Indian languages that I
developed quite sometime back. It's on sourceforge at
http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/projects/miscellaneous.html

(under 'Other infrastructural projects', as
'translib')

I had come up with some kind of regular expression
syntax to express the syllables in Indian words. I
developed sample transliteration rules for four
languages (Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil). 

A snippet from the ruleset for Hindi, just to raise
your curiosity :

^%vowel                 glyph(%vowel)
_%vowel                 glyph(%vowel)
r%cons%vowel            translit(%2,%vowel)
HALF_R_POST
(%cons)a                translit(%1,a)
(%cons)(A|aa)           translit(%1,a) VOWEL_SIGN_AA
%cons%vowel             translit(%1,a)
dep_vowel_sign(%vowel)
%cons%cons%vowel      dep_cons_sign(%1)
translit(%2,%3)
.....

(^ is used by me to denote beginning of word, $ for
end of word, _ for forced ZWNJ etc)

Here, the LHS corresponds to a subset of a word (a
syllable, usually) and the RHS denotes the action, to 
output the glyphs or other actions (including
recursive call to the main transliteration function
translit()). One or more such sub-expressions would
constitute an input word.

btw, I didn't use the regular Unix regexp syntax. With
the framework and syntax I developed, it's quite
feasible to write a regexp parser for Indian 
languages (transliterated using US-English or even
direct UTF-8 or other forms) using such rules.

I hope my answer is relevant to your question.

cheers,
Nagarajan
Indic-computing project

--- Arun Sharma <ar...@sh...> wrote:

> So I was thinking about how one would go about using
> regular expressions
> with an Indian language while I was brushing my
> teeth this morning.
> 
> The current syntax seems to be "character" oriented.
> For eg, f.o matches foo.
> However, if I want to write a regexp such as:
> 
> su . la .
> 
> that matches 
> 
> su bbu la xmi 
> 
> we need to introduce a new concept of a syllable
> into the regexp
> syntax. For eg: "_" might mean one syllable as
> opposed to "." which
> means one character.
...


		
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