Semi-automatic Term Extraction for the African Languages, with Special Reference to Northern Sotho *

Abstract

Worldwide, semi-automatically extracting terms from corpora is becoming the norm for the compilation of terminology lists, term banks or dictionaries for special purposes. If Africanlanguage terminologists are willing to take their rightful place in the new millennium, they must not only take cognisance of this trend but also be ready to implement the new technology. In this article it is advocated that the best way to do the latter two at this stage, is to opt for computationally straightforward alternatives (i.e. use 'raw corpora') and to make use of widely available software tools (e.g. WordSmith Tools). The main aim is therefore to discover whether or not the semiautomatic extraction of terminology from untagged and unmarked running text by means of basic corpus query software is feasible for the African languages. In order to answer this question a fullblown case study revolving around Northern Sotho linguistic texts is discussed in great detail. The computational results are compared throughout with the outcome of a manual excerption, and vice versa. Attention is given to the concepts 'recall' and 'precision'; different approaches are suggested for the treatment of single-word terms versus multi-word terms; and the various findings are summarised in a Linguistics Terminology lexicon presented as an Appendix.

Open source software ecosystems: A Systematic mapping

“…All of the terms in the group with the lowest weight are among the 20 ones with the lowest keyness. However, all of the OSSECO terms are pos-itively key, meaning that they occur more often than would be expected by chance in comparison with the reference corpus (Taljard and De Schryver, 2002). In other words, the OSSECO research community tends to overuse the terms related to OSSECOs more than the academic community in general.…”

Semi-Automatic Retrieval of Definitional Information: A Northern Sotho Case Study*

“…Furthermore, access to user-friendly and affordable software such as WordSmith Tools opens the door for terminologists to query and analyse these corpora automatically or at least semi-automatically 2 . It has already been illustrated by Taljard and De Schryver (2002) that it is indeed possible to extract terms semi-automatically from corpora based on subject-field texts, thus reducing (but of course not eliminating) the dependence of the terminologist on the co-operation of the subject-field specialist.…”

“…It has already been pointed out that it is indeed possible for South African terminologists to compile their own special field corpora, and, by following the methodology suggested by Taljard and De Schryver (2002), to semi-automatically extract terms from electronic texts. Should the terminologist now want to add definitions to the extracted terms, he/she is currently left with two options: (a) to formulate definitions with the help of a subject-field expert, or (b) to provide translational equivalents for the terms in English/Afrikaans, then search for definitions in either an LSP dictionary or existing term lists, and as a last step, translate the definitions from English/Afrikaans into the appropriate Bantu language.…”

“…This was the only verb that was found amongst the 50 test terms. In the study done by Taljard and De Schryver (2002), a total number of 350 terms were extracted from the same texts on which the current study is based. Of these, only 14, i.e.…”

Corpus-driven Bantu Lexicography Part 3: Mapping Meaning onto Use in Lusoga

“…The 'lemmatisation of ...'-formula may be found in the numerous corpusbased lexicographic studies for the various word classes and other word sets of Northern Sotho, including: reflexives (Prinsloo 1992), verbs (Prinsloo 1994, Prinsloo and Gouws 1996, de Schryver and Prinsloo 2001, adjectives (Gouws and Prinsloo 1997), nouns de Schryver 1999, Bosch andPrinsloo 2002), days (de Schryver and Lepota 2001), loan words (Nong et al 2002), copulatives (Prinsloo 2002), terms de Schryver 2002, Taljard and, adverbs (Prinsloo 2003), demonstrative copulatives (de Schryver et al 2004), concords and pronouns (Prinsloo and Gouws 2006), and kinship terms (Prinsloo 2012, Bosch 2012, Prinsloo 2014b). The opposite also occurs, namely when a primarily microstructural aspect impacts the macrostructure, again with examples for Northern Sotho: left-expanded microstructures (Gouws and Prinsloo 2005), reversibility (de Schryver 2006), communicative equivalence (Prinsloo 2006), and paradigms (Prinsloo 2014a).…”