Automatic conversion of colloquial Finnish to standard Finnish

This paper presents a rule-based method for converting between colloquial Finnish and standard Finnish. The method relies upon a small number of orthographical rules combined with a large language model of standard Finnish for ranking the possible conversions. Aside from this contribution, the paper also presents an evaluation corpus consisting of aligned sentences in colloquial Finnish, orthographically-standardised colloquial Finnish and standard Finnish. The method we present outperforms the baseline of simply treating colloquial Finnish as standard Finnish, but is outperformed by a phrase-based MT system trained by the evaluation corpus. The paper also presents preliminary results which show promise for using normalisation in the machine translation task