Sesotho sa Leboa

Base Concepts in the African Languages Compared to Upper Ontologies and the WordNet Top Ontology, Anderson, Winston, Pretorius Laurette, and Kotzé Albert E. , Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), may, Valletta, Malta, (2010)

The orthography of many African languages includes diacritically marked characters. Falling outside the scope of the standard Latin encoding, these characters are often represented in digital language resources as their unmarked equivalents. This renders corpus compilation more difficult, as these languages typically do not have the benefit of large electronic dictionaries to perform diacritic restoration.

This is a demonstration system for a diacritic restoration method that is able to automatically restore diacritics on the basis of local graphemic context. It is based on the machine learning method of Memory-Based learning. We have applied the method to the African languages of Cilubà, Gĩkũyũ, Kĩkamba, Maa, Sesotho sa Leboa, Tshivenḓa and Yoruba.

You can find more information on this system in this paper

Select a language and enter the word or sentence you want to restore diacritics for.
Cilubà (e.g. mutekete)	Gĩkũyũ (e.g. nituronire)
Kĩkamba (e.g. ningulilikana)	Maasai (e.g. oltunani)
Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho) (e.g. swanetse)	Tshivenḓa (e.g. tshiswitulo)
Yoruba (e.g. isinku)

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Authors:

Guy De Pauw: CNTS - Language Technology Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, guy [dot] depauw [at] ua [dot] ac [dot] be
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, gillesmaurice [dot] deschryver [at] ugent [dot] be
Peter Waiganjo Wagacha: School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya, waiganjo [at] uonbi [dot] ac [dot] ke

This demo showcases a part-of-speech tagger for Northern Sotho. It retrieves the morpho-syntactic categories for words in a sentence. It uses MBT, the memory-based tagger trained on a relatively small annotated corpus.

Version1: Ocotober 10 2007 (20k tokens training set)
Version2: December 8 2007 (35k tokens training set)

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Type in the text you want to tag (2,500 character limit)
Example: Motho ge a sa tseba o swanetše go dumela seo gore bao ba tsebago ba mmotše.

[Tagging the text might take a while]

Authors:

Guy De Pauw: CNTS - Language Technology Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium, guy [dot] depauw [at] ua [dot] ac [dot] be
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, gillesmaurice [dot] deschryver [at] ugent [dot] be

Paper

Sounds like ‘Sutu’, Anderson, Winston, and Kotzé Albert E. , South African Journal of African Languages, 06/2005, Volume 25, Issue 2, p.111-123, (2005)