My name is PhD Kimmo Granqvist, I am a Senior University Lecturer in Romani Language and Culture at the University of Helsinki. I bear a title of Docent in Modern Greek language and General Linguists. I have worked on and taught different Romani dialects, such as Finnish Romani, East Slovak Romani, and Kalderaš.
Along with my university tasks, I am active as a sole trader specialised in Natural Language Processing (NLP). I develop rule-based language technology aimed at Romani dialects. My current offerings include linguistically solid research-based tools: automatic morphological analysers, disambiguators, spell checkers, and online dictionaries of Romani. These products are always tailored according to the needs of the customer.
Romani is the second-largest minority language in Europe, after Catalan. It is mostly used orally within Romani communities, but it is undergoing everywhere a functional expansion and being increasingly used publicly, in writing and in broadcast media. It is being taught in many European countries at all levels of education.
While many Romani dialects are well documented, very few NLP tools exist. The NLP tools created by me are intended to be used by Romani writers, translators, subtitlers of TV programmes, and for linguistic research etc. They are expected to make a societal impact by creating a basis for implementation of new tools for proofreading Romani for word processing software such LibreOffice and other lexical tools. I support the use of open source software by working in a Linux environment.