The effectiveness of morphological rules for an isiZulu spelling checker

Bosch, Sonja E.; Eiselen, Roald

doi:10.1080/02572117.2005.10587246

Cited by 29 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This being the case, the 'add word' feature of the spellchecker is an exciting avenue for further investigation into new words that are being added to the lexicon, and thus may soon provide a wealth of evidence on the intellectualisation of the language. The 'add word' feature is unique to this isiZulu spellchecker compared to earlier attempts (Bosch & Eiselen 2005;, which is providing a wealth of information for spellchecker development as well as linguistic analyses. A controlled test setting with university students might assist in obtaining such results.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…While efforts have been documented to develop spellcheckers (please see especially Bosch & Eiselen 2005), these tools are not available. The plugins for OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird -developed by translate.org.za in 2008 -are freely available, but they have not been updated so they no longer work with the latest versions (since OpenOffice v4.x).…”

Section: Human Language Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluation of the E ffects of a S pellchecker on the I ntellectuali s ation of I siZulu

Keet¹,

Khumalo²

2017

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Through its bilingual language policy and plan that recognises English and isiZulu as official languages of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), UKZN has aggressively promoted the intellectualisation of isiZulu as an effective strategy in advancing indigenous, under-resourced African languages as vehicles for innovation, science, and technology research in Higher Education and Training institutions. UKZN recently launched human language technologies (HLTs) in isiZulu as enablers towards the intellectualisation of the language. One of these is an isiZulu spellchecker, which was trained on an organic isiZulu National Corpus. We evaluate the isiZulu spellchecker's effects on the intellectualisation of isiZulu. Two surveys were conducted with the target end-users, consisting of relevant questions and the System Usability Scale, and an analysis of words added to the spellchecker. It is evident that the spellchecker has had a positive impact on the work of target end-users, who also perceive it as an enabler in the intellectualisation of isiZulu. The survey responses show modest success for a first version of the tool. The analysis of the words added to the spellchecker indicates that new words are being added to the isiZulu lexicon.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Human Language Technologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of the E ffects of a S pellchecker on the I ntellectuali s ation of I siZulu

Keet¹,

Khumalo²

2017

Alternation

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“…which is a subset of the conjugation (ba-for 3rd person plural) and CARP (-el-) and no details of its implementation is provided [3]. A related work on morphological rules focuses on nouns [23].…”

Section: Related Work On Isizulu Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It covers only a fraction of the complexities of the isiZulu verb; for instance, it addresses only one extension to the exclusion of the causative, applicative, and the reciprocal extensions. Other attempts to formal approaches to isiZulu morphology focus predominately on nouns rather than verbs [23,24], or describe only a few sample regular expressions that cover a very small fraction of the verb [3]. The morphology of the verb is widely regarded as the most interesting theoretically.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb

Keet

Khumalo

2017

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

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Abstract. The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject for on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb are (and, by extension, the Bantu verb morphology). To this end, we iteratively specify the grammar as a Context Free Grammar, and evaluate it computationally. The grammar presented in this paper covers the subject and object concords, negation, present tense, aspect, mood, and the causative, applicative, stative, and the reciprocal verbal extensions, politeness, the wh-question modifiers, and aspect doubling, ensuring their correct order as they appear in verbs. The grammar conforms to specification.

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“…Corpora in Africa are, obviously, not only about variational studies of English. They have supported the development, enhancement, or evaluation of a broad range of natural language processing tools in Africa: a speech synthesizer in Ibibio (Ekpenyong et al 2014), part of speech tagging in Bantu languages (de Pauw et al 2012), a statistical English-Luo machine translation system (de , spell checkers, as well as extended applications such as language identification in Gikuyu, isiZulu, Tiv, Swahili, Hausa and Igbo (Akosu & Selmat 2013;Chege et al 2010;Bosch & Eiselen 2005). The use of corpora for the development of predictive texting and translation memory solutions in other environments has also been described (Antia 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes

Antia¹,

Hendricks²

2019

Studies in Corpus Linguistics

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Western Cape Corpus analysis has become established as an approach to the study of language description or for applied pursuits in language teaching, terminology, and so on. However, because of the social indexicalities of language use, corpora can also inform studies of social phenomena. This chapter draws on social semiotics to argue that, in the analysis of social phenomena, meanings that are socially significant can be read not only from what is said in corpora, but also from a range of other resources, such as names of persons and places as well as language choices made in texts. This chapter thus uses two heuristics, onomastics and discursive mono-/multilingualism, to query a diachronic corpus associated with a South African political party for evidence of whether or not the party has over time become more inclusive, contrary to its discursive positioning by a rival party as an untransformed organisation. The analysis shows evidence of the party opening up to diversity in terms of race, gender, geography, and language choice, but the finding raises the question of the relationship between semiotic evidence and reality.

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The effectiveness of morphological rules for an isiZulu spelling checker

Cited by 29 publications

References 6 publications

Evaluation of the E ffects of a S pellchecker on the I ntellectuali s ation of I siZulu

Evaluation of the E ffects of a S pellchecker on the I ntellectuali s ation of I siZulu

Grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb

Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes

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