Experimental Fast-Tracking of Morphological Analysers for Nguni Languages

The development of natural language processing (NLP) components is resource-intensive and therefore justifies exploring ways of reducing development time and effort when building NLP components. This paper addresses the experimental fast-tracking of the development of finite-state morphological analysers for Xhosa, Swati and (Southern) Ndebele by using an existing prototype of a morphological analyser for Zulu. The research question is whether fast-tracking is feasible across the language boundaries between these closely related varieties. The objective is a thorough assessment of the recognition rates yielded by the Zulu morphological analyser for the three related languages. The strategy is to use fast-tracking techniques that consist of several cycles of the following steps: applying the analyser to corpus data from all languages, identifying (types of) failures, and implementing the respective changes in the analyser. The tests show that the high degree of shared typological prope...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Sonja E. Bosch, Laurette Pretorius, Kholisa Podile, Axel Fleisch
• Keywords: Education, Finite-state Morphological Analysers, LREC 2008, Morphological Analyser, Zulu Morphological Analyser