Building a computational morphological analyser/generator for Zulu using the Xerox finite-state tools

TitleBuilding a computational morphological analyser/generator for Zulu using the Xerox finite-state tools
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2003
AuthorsBosch, Sonja E., and Pretorius Laurette
BooktitleProceedings of the Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
DateApril 2003
LocationBudapest, Hungary
Abstract

Zulu is a member of the Bantu language family and is spoken by approximately 8 million people in South Africa. In terms of natural language processing it is certainly a lesser-studied language of the world. This language family is characterised by its rich agglutinating morphological structures. In this paper we focus on particularly complex constructions pertaining to Zulu nouns and verbs, discussing both the morphotactics, and the morphophonological alternation rules that apply. Our approach in building the analyser/generator for Zulu, using the Xerox finite-state tools, in particular lexc and xfst (Beesley and Karttunen, 2003) is explained.