VenPro: a morphological analyzer for Venetan

This document reports the process of extending MorphoPro for Venetan, a lesser-used language spoken in the Nort-Eastern part of Italy. MorphoPro is the morphological component of TextPro, a suite of tools oriented towards a number of NLP tasks. In order to extend this component to Venetan, we developed a declarative representation of the morphological knowledge necessary to analyze and synthesize Venetan words. This task was challenging for several reasons, which are common to a number of lesser-used languages: although Venetan is widely used as an oral language in everyday life, its written usage is very limited; efforts for defining a standard orthography and grammar are very recent and not well established; despite recent attempts to propose a unified orthography, no Venetan standard is widely used. Besides, there are different geographical varieties and it is strongly influenced by Italian. However, the similar inflectional system of Venetan and Italian was an advantage, because it was possible to adapt MorphoPro instead of creating a new morphological analyzer from scratch.