An overview of Sesotho BLARK content

Abstract

This article overviews digital language resources available for Sesotho, an official language of South Africa. The South African Center for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) repository is used as a reference as it is the official host of various language resources for South African languages. A total of 18 written resources are identified from the repository, and a further 16 spoken resources are identified. Finally, a total of 45 applications and modules were identified. Findings indicate that the majority of applications and modules available for Sesotho are in fact general resources aimed at all eleven official South African languages. Furthermore, the available resources indicate an inclination to the development of entry level, basic language resources and an absence of middle and higher resources with functionalities such as semantic analyses for written resources and prosody prediction for spoken resources. The study is hindered by the dearth of resource specific evaluations and related research and exacerbated by the absence of some of the resources on the repository.

A Corpus-Based List of Frequently Used Words in Sesotho

“…Digital language resources and human language technologies audits for South African languages indicate that all indigenous languages of South Africa are under-resourced (Grover et al, 2010(Grover et al, , 2011Barnard et al, 2014;Moors et al, 2018a,b). More specifically, Sibeko and Setaka (2022) reviewed the basic language resource kit for Sesotho and concluded that many necessary digital language resources are still lacking.…”

Developing Resources for Measuring Text Readability in Sesotho

“…Sesotho is used by more than ten million speakers in a few countries in Southern Africa including South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe (Marupi and Charamba, 2022;Sibeko and Setaka, 2022). In fact, it is one of the official languages in Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.…”

“…It is also used for media, political, religious, and other uses. Even so, a recent investigation of the Sesotho Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) content has revealed that there is a severe shortage of digital language resources available for Sesotho (Sibeko and Setaka, 2022). As such, Sesotho remains a low-resourced language (Roux and Bosch, 2019;Sibeko and Setaka, 2022).…”

“…Even so, a recent investigation of the Sesotho Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) content has revealed that there is a severe shortage of digital language resources available for Sesotho (Sibeko and Setaka, 2022). As such, Sesotho remains a low-resourced language (Roux and Bosch, 2019;Sibeko and Setaka, 2022). Consequently, automating the process of objectively investigating text readability in Sesotho using classical readability metrics requires the development of a few basic language resources.…”

Harnessing Google Translations to Develop a Readability Corpus for Sesotho: An Exploratory Study

“…The investigation into text readability levels has been a subject of scholarly examination spanning over a century (De Clercq & Hoste 2016, Zamanian & Heydari 2012. However, there remains a notable dearth of research pertaining to text readability in African indigenous languages (Sibeko & De Clercq 2023, Sibeko & Van Zaanen 2021. To put it simply, readability pertains to the ease with which a given text can be read (Dahl 2004).…”