![Arvi Hurskainen vuonna 2016](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Arvi_Hurskainen_vuonna_2016.JPG)
Arvi Johannes Hurskainen (born January 25, 1941 in
Kitee
Kitee ( sv, Kides) is a town and a municipality of Finland.
It is located in the province of Eastern Finland and is part of the North Karelia region. The municipality has a population of () and covers an area of of which is water. The populat ...
) is a Finnish scholar of
language technology Language technology, often called human language technology (HLT), studies methods of how computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. Working with language technology often requires broa ...
and linguistics. Since 1985 he has developed rule-based language technology mainly for
Swahili, but also for other languages, including
machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...
from English to Finnish. He has created a development environment called SALAMA (acronym for Swahili Language Manager), but it suits to any language. The major applications developed so far include the following: the spell checker for Swahili,
the annotator of corpus texts,
an advanced dictionary between Swahili and English
and translators
from Swahili to English, from English to Swahili, and from English to Finnish. He has also developed an advanced learning system for Swahili
and a system for producing targeted vocabularies for language learners.
Hurskainen has compiled two
annotate
An annotation is extra information associated with a particular point in a document or other piece of information. It can be a note that includes a comment or explanation. Annotations are sometimes presented in the margin of book pages. For anno ...
d corpora, Helsinki Corpus of Swahili 1.0 and Helsinki Corpus of Swahili 2.0.
Study and work history
He first studied theology at the University of Helsinki. Later, after having worked in Tanzania, he studied anthropology and published his PhD dissertation Cattle and Culture. The Structure of a Pastoral Parakujo Society.
In 1976 he worked as a researcher in Jipemoyo Project, sponsored by the
Academy of Finland in Tanzania, and in 1977–1980 in the service of the Finnish Lutheran Mission in Helsinki.
Hurskainen worked at the
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the ...
, first as a lecturer in 1981–1989 and then as a professor in 1989–2006. In between, in 1984–1985 he worked at
Tumaini University in
Tanzania
Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...
. Before the university career, he worked in Tanzania for eight years in various teaching tasks. He was the director of the Department of Asian and African Studies in 1999–2001. He retired in 2006.
In 1988–1992 he directed the fieldwork project Swahili Language and Folklore, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Finland and the
University of Dar-es-Salaam
The University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) is a public university in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was established in 1961 as an affiliate college of the University of London. The university became an affiliate of the University of East Africa (UEA) in 1 ...
. The project produced the speech corpus DAHE (Dar-es-Salaam - Helsinki), which was later digitized.
Language technology
Hurskainen has developed
language technology Language technology, often called human language technology (HLT), studies methods of how computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. Working with language technology often requires broa ...
by making use of detailed language analysis. The basic description of language is made using the
finite-state transducer
A finite-state transducer (FST) is a finite-state machine with two memory ''tapes'', following the terminology for Turing machines: an input tape and an output tape. This contrasts with an ordinary finite-state automaton, which has a single tape. ...
s, first developed by
Kimmo Koskenniemi. The individual words are then
disambiguated using
constraint grammar technology. Also, the
syntactic mapping is performed in this phase. Disambiguation and syntactic mapping are performed using Constraint Grammar 3.0, originally developed by
Fred Karlsson and implemented by Pasi Tapanainen from Connexor.
The rule-based approach developed by Hurskainen has similarities with other rule-based systems, such as Grammatical Framework
and Nooj.
Rule-based approaches to language technology, especially as they apply to machine translation, are considered suitable for low-resource languages with rich morphology, such as Bantu languages.
[Hurskainen, Arvi. 2018. Sustainable language technology for African languages. In Agwuele, Augustine and Bodomo, Adams (eds), The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics, 359-375. London: Routledge Publishers. ]
Production
Web material
* SALAMA,
a computational environment for developing language technology applications, was initiated in 1985, and the development continues.
* At the moment there are 96 technical reports on language technology, mainly on issues related to machine translation.
References
External links
Blog post by Arvi Hurskainen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hurskainen, Arvi
1941 births
Living people
Finnish expatriates in Tanzania
Linguists from Finland
Translators to Swahili
20th-century linguists
20th-century translators
21st-century linguists
21st-century translators
University of Helsinki alumni