Semi-automated extraction of morphological grammars for Nguni with special reference to Southern Ndebele

TitleSemi-automated extraction of morphological grammars for Nguni with special reference to Southern Ndebele
Publication TypeProceedings Article
Year of Conference2012
AuthorsPretorius, Laurette, and Bosch Sonja E.
Conference NameProceedings of the workshop on Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages (SALTMIL8/AfLaT2012)
Pagination73-78
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Conference LocationIstanbul, Turkey
ISBN Number978-2-9517408-7-7
Abstract

A finite-state morphological grammar for Southern Ndebele, a seriously under-resourced language, has been semi-automatically obtained from a general Nguni morphological analyser, which was bootstrapped from a mature hand-written morphological analyser for Zulu. The results for Southern Ndebele morphological analysis, using the Nguni analyser, are surprisingly good, showing that the Nguni languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati and Southern Ndebele) display significant cross-linguistic similarities that can be exploited to accelerate documentation, resource-building and software development. The project embraces recognized best practices for the encoding of resources to ensure sustainability, access, and easy adaptability to future formats, lingware packages and development platforms.

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