Akana (Turkish NLP Toolkit)

Akana (named after Ak Ana, the primordial creator goddess in Turkic mythology) is a modern, blazingly fast Turkish Natural Language Processing toolkit written in Rust with seamless Python bindings via PyO3 and native hardware SIMD acceleration via StringZilla.

Repository: https://github.com/altaidevorg/akana

Key Features

• Phonology & Orthography Engine:
  • Turkish alphabet characteristics and locale-aware casing (ı $\leftrightarrow$ I, i $\leftrightarrow$ İ).
  • Major (2-way A/E) and Minor (4-way I/İ/U/Ü) Vowel Harmony validation.
  • Consonant softening / mutation ($p \rightarrow b$, $ç \rightarrow c$, $t \rightarrow d$, $k \rightarrow \check{g}/g$).
  • Epenthetic vowel drop (burun $\rightarrow$ burnu, akıl $\rightarrow$ aklı).
  • Consonant doubling / gemination (hak $\rightarrow$ hakkı, his $\rightarrow$ hissi).
• Tokenization & Sentence Segmentation:
  • Zero-allocation, rule-based Turkish tokenizer handling proper nouns with apostrophes (İstanbul'da), abbreviations (Prof., Dr., vb.), currencies, URLs, emails, hashtags, dates, and times.
  • Sentence Boundary Detector with Turkish quotation and abbreviation lookahead.
• Normalization & Spell Checking:
  • Asciifier & De-asciifier for Turkish diacritics restoration.
  • SIMD Spell Checker: Accelerated with StringZilla hardware instructions for ultra-fast Levenshtein / edit distance candidate scoring.
  • Informal Text Normalizer: Spoken Turkish colloquialisms reduction (yapcam $\rightarrow$ yapacağım, geliyom $\rightarrow$ geliyorum, noldu $\rightarrow$ ne oldu) and letter elongation deduping (çooook $\rightarrow$ çok).
• Dual-Engine Morphology Suite:
  1. Standard Morphology (akana.Morphology):
     • 93,167 Root Lexicon: Broad-coverage Turkish vocabulary ingested from Zemberek, TDK, location gazetteers, and modern corpus lexicons.
     • Multi-tier morphotactic graph: nominal cases, plurals, possessives, verbal tenses, compound copulas, voices (passive/causative), participles, diminutives, relative -ki chains, and derivations.
     • Compound Word Decomposer: Deconstructs compound nouns (denizaltı $\rightarrow$ deniz + altı, akbaba $\rightarrow$ ak + baba).
     • Morphological Generator (generate("kitap", ["Noun", "A3sg", "P1sg", "Dat"]) $\rightarrow$ "kitabıma").
     • Context-aware Disambiguator for best-parse selection.
  2. Syntactic Expressive Morphology (akana.SyntacticMorphology) (Google FSMNLP 2019 Architecture):
     • Inflectional Groups (IG): Hierarchical derivational tiers with Universal Dependencies (UD) category-value feature maps.
     • Zero-Derivation Elimination: Cross-categorized lexical entries (e.g. güzel, hızlı, soğuk) eliminating phantom +^DB morphemes.
     • Dedicated, isolated 47,202 gold-standard root lexicon.
• Modern & Classic Turkish Readability Suite:
  • Kalyoncu (2025) Formula Suite: Multi-regression equations (Formulas 1–4, $R^2$ up to 0.99) with embedded 4,600-word familiarity lexicon and exact grade-level mapping (3. Sınıf Öncesi to Lisansüstü).
  • Classical Formulas: Ateşman (1997), Çetinkaya-Uzun (2010), and Bezirci-Yılmaz (2010).
• Turkish AI Writing Style Auditor & Humanizer Engine:
  • Detects LLM writing signatures: punctuation anomalies (excessive em-dashes, semicolons with conjunctions, colons), predicate tense repetition (-mektedir ratio), rhythm monotony ($CV = \sigma / \mu$), bureaucratic connectors, translationese calques, tricolon lists, and hypophora questions.
  • Actionable prompt generation across 5 registers (hukuki-idari, akademik-kurumsal, analitik-gazetecilik, deneme-blog, edebi-yaratıcı).
• Syntax & Universal Dependencies:
  • Transition-based parser outputting Universal Dependencies (UD) format and CoNLL-U trees.
• High-Level NLP Primitives:
  • Turkish Syllabification & Hyphenation.
  • Number to Words Converter (Cardinals, Ordinals, Currency).
  • Named Entity Recognition (PER, LOC, ORG, DATE, MONEY, PERCENT).
  • Keyword Extraction (Turkish RAKE) & Extractive Summarization (TextRank).
• High-Performance Architecture:
  • Pure Rust core with zero JVM dependency.
  • Python package via pyo3 and maturin (compatible with uv).
  • Command Line Interface (CLI) for shell workflows.

Performance Benchmarks (Akana vs Zeyrek / Zemberek & StringZilla SIMD)

Tested on real Turkish text corpora and 10,500 morphological queries (benchmarks/):

Python Quickstart

Installation

# Using uv
uv pip install akana

# Using pip
pip install akana

Usage in Python

import akana

# 1. Standard Morphological Analysis (Zemberek-Compatible Format)
morph = akana.Morphology()
parses = morph.analyze("kitabıma")
for parse in parses:
    print(parse["lemma"], parse["primary_pos"], parse["morphemes"])
# -> kitap Noun ['Noun', 'P1sg', 'Dat']

# 2. Google-Style Syntactic Expressive Morphology (Inflectional Groups & UD)
syn_parses = akana.syntactic_analyze("geldiğimizde")
for p in syn_parses:
    print(p.formatted)
    # Output: (gel[VB]+[Polarity=Pos])([NOMP]-PastNom+[Case=Loc]+[PersonNumber=A3sg]+[Possessive=P1pl])+[Proper=False]
    for ig in p.inflectional_groups:
        print(f"  • IG [{ig.pos}] Deriv: {ig.derivation} -> {ig.features}")

# 3. Morphological Generation
surface = morph.generate("kitap", ["Noun", "A3sg", "P1sg", "Dat"])
print(surface)  # -> kitabıma

# 4. Spell Checking with StringZilla SIMD
spell = akana.SpellChecker()
print("Is 'kitap' correct?", spell.is_correct("kitap"))
suggestions = spell.suggest("ktap", max_distance=2, max_suggestions=3)
print("Suggestions for 'ktap':", [s["word"] for s in suggestions])

# 5. De-asciification & Normalization
print(akana.deasciify("turkce nlp cok hizli calisiyor"))
# -> türkçe nlp çok hızlı çalışıyor

print(akana.normalize_informal("nooldu ya yapcam dedim"))
# -> ne oldu ya yapacağım dedim

# 6. Compound Word Decomposition
compounds = akana.decompose_compound("denizaltı")
print(compounds)
# -> [{'surface': 'denizaltı', 'part1': 'deniz', 'part2': 'altı', ...}]

# 7. Modern Turkish Readability Analysis (Kalyoncu 2025 & Classic)
report = akana.analyze_readability("Küçük çocuk bahçede neşeyle koşuyordu.")
print(f"Kalyoncu F1: {report.kalyoncu_formula1.score} ({report.kalyoncu_formula1.grade_level})")
print(f"Ateşman: {report.atesman.score} ({report.atesman.grade_level})")

# 8. Turkish AI Writing Style Auditor & Actionable Humanizer Prompt
audit = akana.audit_ai_style("Yapay zeka teknolojileri, modern dünyada kritik bir rol oynamaktadır. Bu bağlamda —özellikle veri alanında— hayati önem taşımaktadır.")
print(f"AI Score: {audit.ai_score}/100 ({audit.verdict})")

prompt = akana.humanize_prompt("Bu doğrultuda hayati önem taşımaktadır.", register="blog")
print(prompt)

# 9. High-Level Turkish NLP Suite
# Syllabification & Hyphenation
print(akana.syllabify("Türkçe"))     # -> ['Türk', 'çe']
print(akana.hyphenate("bilgisayar")) # -> 'bil-gi-sa-yar'

# Number to Words Converter
print(akana.number_to_words(1923))            # -> 'bin dokuz yüz yirmi üç'
print(akana.currency_to_words(1250.50, "TL"))  # -> 'bin iki yüz elli lira elli kuruş'

# Named Entity Recognition (NER)
entities = akana.extract_entities("Prof. Dr. Ahmet Yılmaz 16 Ağustos 2026 tarihinde 500 TL ödeme yaptı.")
for e in entities:
    print(f"[{e.label}] {e.text}")

# Keyword Extraction (Turkish RAKE) & Extractive Summarization (TextRank)
keywords = akana.extract_keywords("Doğal dil işleme ve morfolojik analiz...", top_k=5)
summary = akana.summarize("Uzun metin...", max_sentences=2)

CLI Usage

The akana CLI supports direct text arguments or reading from file via -f, --file:

# AI style auditing
akana ai-audit "Bu bağlamda kritik bir rol oynamaktadır."
akana ai-audit -f article.txt

# Generate humanizer rewrite prompt
akana humanize-prompt "Bu doğrultuda hayati önem taşımaktadır." --register blog

# Syntactic morphological analysis (Google FSMNLP format)
akana syntactic-analyze "geldiğimizde"

# Standard morphological analysis
akana analyze "evlerimizde"

# Readability analysis
akana readability "Küçük çocuk bahçede neşeyle koşuyordu."

# Syllabification & Number conversion
akana syllabify "bilgisayar"
akana number 1923

# De-asciification & Normalization
akana deasciify "turkce nlp"
akana normalize "yapcam"

# Universal Dependencies Parsing
akana parse "Ali güzel kitabı okudu."

Rust Crate Usage (akana-core)

Add to Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
akana-core = { version = "0.1", default-features = true }

use akana_core::morphology::TurkishMorphology;
use akana_core::syntactic_morphology::TurkishSyntacticMorphology;
use akana_core::phonology::to_turkish_lower;

fn main() {
    let lower = to_turkish_lower("İSTANBUL");
    println!("Lower: {}", lower);

    // Standard Morphology
    let morph = TurkishMorphology::new();
    let parses = morph.analyze("kitabım");
    for p in parses {
        println!("{}", p.formatted);
    }

    // Syntactic Expressive Morphology (Inflectional Groups)
    let syn_morph = TurkishSyntacticMorphology::new();
    let syn_parses = syn_morph.analyze("geldiğimizde");
    for p in syn_parses {
        println!("{}", p.formatted);
    }
}

Developer Guide & Publishing

For local development setup, testing, running benchmarks, compiling native wheels, and publishing releases to PyPI & crates.io, see the Developer & Maintainer Guide.

Acknowledgements & Academic Citations

Akana builds upon decades of pioneering linguistic and natural language processing research in Turkish. We gratefully acknowledge and credit:

• Kemal Oflazer: Foundational two-level Turkish morphological analysis (1994) and the Inflectional Group (IG) representation (2003) for Turkish dependency syntax.
• Ahmet A. Akın & The Zemberek Team: Open-source Turkish morphology, phonotactics, and extensive root vocabulary database.
• Oğuzhan Güngör & Zeyrek Contributors: The pure-Python Zemberek port that inspired modern open Turkish NLP tooling.
• Google Research (Adnan Öztürel, Tolga Kayadelen, Işın Demirşahin): "A Syntactically Expressive Morphological Analyzer for Turkish" (FSMNLP 2019), introducing zero-derivation elimination and two-level inflectional group FSTs.
• Mustafa Kalyoncu & Co-authors (2025): Development of modern Turkish readability formulas (Formulas 1–4) and the empirical 4,600-word grade-level familiarity corpus.
• Ender Ateşman (1997), Çetinkaya-Uzun (2010), Bezirci-Yılmaz (2010): Classical readability research for the Turkish education system.
• Ash Vardanian & Unum Cloud: StringZilla, providing hardware-accelerated SIMD vector search and edit distance algorithms.
• Bushra Beg (Turkce-Humanizer): Research into Turkish AI writing style signatures, calques, and stylistic heuristics.

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT License

at your option.