SALAMA - Swahili Language Manager

SALAMA is a rule-based system for managing a number of applications on Swahili. It includes a tokenizer, morphological analyzer, morphological disambiguator, semantic disambiguator, syntactic analyzer, and a text-based machine translation system from Swahili to English.
In morphology we have earlier used finite state methods with two-level description. Recently we have developed an alternative method using a combination of different rule types. We have used pattern matching rules for initial analysis (sufficient e.g. for a spell checker), and the accurate analysis with due ambiguity is produced with post-processing rules.
In disambiguation and syntactic mapping we have used a Constraint Grammar parser (CG2), licensed from Connexor. This parser is also used in isolating and handling multi-word expressions.
SALAMA includes also a number of rules for constituent re-ordering, and for transferring the grammatical and lexical information from Swahili into correct English language.