In this article the integrated corpus query functionality of the dictionary compilation software TshwaneLex is analysed. Attention is given to the handling of both raw corpus data and annotated corpus data. With regard to the latter it is shown how, with a minimum of human effort, machine learning techniques can be employed to obtain part-of-speech tagged corpora that can be used for lexicographic purposes. All points are illustrated with data drawn from English and Northern Sotho. The tools and techniques themselves, however, are language-independent, and as such the encouraging outcomes of this study are far-reaching.

Abstract:Computational morphological analysis is an important first step in the automatic treatment of natural language and a useful lexicographic tool. This article describes a corpus-based approach to the morphological analysis of Swahili. We particularly focus our discussion on its ability to retrieve lemmas for word forms and evaluate it as a tool for corpus-based dictionary compilation.