2017/12/26 by Renato Fabbri, Fabbri, Renato
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Music and Audio Processing #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Video Analysis and Summarization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.09359
openalex publication_date 2017/12/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A minimal constructed language (conlang) is useful for experiments and\ncomfortable for making tools. The Toki Pona (TP) conlang is minimal both in the\nvocabulary (with only 14 letters and 124 lemmas) and in the (about) 10 syntax\nrules. The language is useful for being a used and somewhat established minimal\nconlang with at least hundreds of fluent speakers. This article exposes current\nconcepts and resources for TP, and makes available Python (and Vim) scripted\nroutines for the analysis of the language, synthesis of texts, syntax\nhighlighting schemes, and the achievement of a preliminary TP Wordnet. Focus is\non the analysis of the basic vocabulary, as corpus analyses were found. The\nsynthesis is based on sentence templates, relates to context by keeping track\nof used words, and renders larger texts by using a fixed number of phonemes\n(e.g. for poems) and number of sentences, words and letters (e.g. for\nparagraphs). Syntax highlighting reflects morphosyntactic classes given in the\nofficial dictionary and different solutions are described and implemented in\nthe well-established Vim text editor. The tentative TP Wordnet is made\navailable in three patterns of relations between synsets and word lemmas. In\nsummary, this text holds potentially novel conceptualizations about, and tools\nand results in analyzing, synthesizing and syntax highlighting the TP language.\n