Developing a tagset and tagger for the African languages of South Africa with special reference to Xhosa

Allwood, Jens; Grönqvist, Leif; Hendrikse, A. P.

doi:10.2989/16073610309486345

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…While standardization and rigid rules regarding these aspects are impractical due to the large differences between natural languages, guidelines and some degree of uniformity among similar or related languages (McEnery et al, 1998;Allwood et al, 2003;Beesley and Karttunen, 2003;Erjavec, 2004) is desirable in terms of, for instance maintenance and re-usability. 4.3.1.1.…”

Section: Specification Of the Lexical Formsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype For Zulu

Pretorius

Bosch

2003

Mach Translat

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As one of the largest of the 11 official languages of South Africa, Zulu is spoken by approximately 9 million people. It forms part of a language family which is characterized by rich agglutinating morphological structures. This paper discusses a prototype of a computational morphological analyzer for Zulu, built by means of the Xerox finite state tools, in particular lexc and xfst. In addition to considering both the morphotactics and the morphophonological alternation rules that apply, the focus is on implementation and other issues that need to be resolved in order to produce a useful software artefact for automated morphological analysis. The current status of the prototype is alluded to by providing morphological scope, that is the various word categories (parts of speech) that may be handled, and the lexical coverage in terms of the number of different Zulu roots that are included in the embedded lexicon of the analyzer. Preliminary testing and validation procedures are briefly discussed.

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Section: Specification Of the Lexical Formsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype For Zulu

Pretorius

Bosch

2003

Mach Translat

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“…paragraph 4). Allwood et al (2003) also describe a tagset for Xhosa. However, a full description of the tagset is lacking, and, as far as we understand, it does not conform to the EAGLES standard.…”

Section: Design Of a Tagset For Northern Sothomentioning

confidence: 99%

On the development of a tagset for Northern Sotho with special reference to the issue of standardisation

et al. 2008

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Working with corpora in the South African Bantu languages has up till now been limited to the utilisation of raw corpora. Such corpora, however, have limited functionality. Thus the next logical step in any NLP application is the development of software for automatic tagging of electronic texts. The development of a tagset is one of the first steps in corpus annotation. The authors of this article argue that the design of a tagset cannot be isolated from the purpose of the tagset, or from the place of the tagset and its design within the bigger picture of the architecture of corpus annotation. Usage-related aspects therefore feature prominently in the design of the tagset for Northern Sotho. It is explained why this proposed tagset is biased towards human readability, rather than machine readability; this choice of a stochastic tagger is motivated, and the relationship between tokenising, tagging, morphological analysis and parsing is discussed. In order to account at least to some extent for the morphological complexity of Northern Sotho at the tagging level, a multilevel annotation is opted for: the first level comprising obligatory information and the second optional and recommended information. Finally, aspects of standardisation are considered against the background of reuse, of sharing of resources, and of possible adaptation for use by other disjunctively written South African Bantu languages. It is not the aim of this article to evaluate the results of any tagging procedure using the proposed tagset. It only describes the design and motivates the choices made with regard to the tagset design. However, an evaluation is in process and results will be published in the near future (cf. Faaß et al., s.a.)

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“…De Pauw et al [11]has done some PoS preliminary experiments for Dholuo language and finally, using machine learning methods,De Pauw [12] developed one for the Gikuyu language. Outside Kenya, some work has been done for the South African languagefor example a number of tag sets and preliminary systems are available for Xhosa [13], and Northern Sotho [14][15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kamba Part of Speech Tagger Using Memory Based Approach

Kituku¹,

George²,

Wagacha³

2015

IJNLC

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Part of speech tagging is very important and the initial work towards machine translation and text manipulation. Though much has been done in this regard to the Indo-European and Asiatic languages, development of part of speech tagging tools for African languages is wanting. As a result, these languages are classified as under resourced languages. This paper presents data driven part of speech tagging tools for kikamba which is an under resourced language spoken mostly in Machakos, Makueni and Kitui. The tool is made using the lazy learner called Memory Based Tagger (MBT) with approximately thirty thousand word corpuses. The corpus is collected, cleaned and formatted with regard to MBT and experiment run. Very encouraging performance is reported despite little amount of corpus, which clearly shows that using the state of art technology of data driven methods tools can be developed for under resourced languages. We report a precision of 83%, recall of 72% and F-score of 75% and in terms of accuracy for the known and unknown words, and accuracy of 94.65% and71.93% respectively with overall accuracy of 90.68%..This predicts that with little source of corpus using data driven approach, we can generate tools for the under resourced languages in Kenya.

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Developing a tagset and tagger for the African languages of South Africa with special reference to Xhosa

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype For Zulu

Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype For Zulu

On the development of a tagset for Northern Sotho with special reference to the issue of standardisation

Kamba Part of Speech Tagger Using Memory Based Approach

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