Abstract
The central research question that is addressed in this article is: How can ZulMorph, a finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, be employed to add value to Zulu lexical semantics with specific reference to Zulu verbs? The verb is the most complex word category in Zulu. Due to the agglutinative nature of Zulu morphology, limited information can be computationally extracted from running Zulu text without the support of sufficiently reliable computational morphological analysis by means of which the essential meanings of, amongst others, verbs can be exposed. In this article we describe a corpus-based approach to adding the English meaning to Zulu extended verb roots, thereby enhancing ZulMorph as a lexical knowledge base.
Highlights
The integral role of the Internet and the world-wide web in facilitating the production and consumption of enormous amounts of information in digital space depends on the ability of computers to perform a wide variety of tasks involving human language
We show how ZulMorph, a comprehensive hand-crafted finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, and the South African Constitution (SAC), a small electronically available parallel English–Zulu corpus which is an official document of the highest order, translated into all official languages, can contribute to Zulu lexical semantics with English as pivot language
We have shown how ZulMorph, a comprehensive hand-crafted finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, and a small electronically available parallel English–Zulu corpus, namely the South African Constitution (SAC), which is an official document of the highest order, translated into all official languages, can enrich Zulu lexical semantics with English as pivot language
Summary
The integral role of the Internet and the world-wide web in facilitating the production and consumption of enormous amounts of information in digital space depends on the ability of computers to perform a wide variety of tasks involving human language This requires, amongst others, computational approaches to representing and understanding world knowledge on the one hand, and knowledge about human language in machine-processable form on the other hand. When dealing with underresourced languages, it is common practice to use as much of the available language data and resources as possible For this reason, both kinds of approaches to lexical semantic knowledge are employed: hand-crafted expert linguistic/ lexical knowledge in machine-processable form as well as growing volumes of. We show how ZulMorph, a comprehensive hand-crafted finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, and the South African Constitution (SAC), a small electronically available parallel English–Zulu corpus which is an official document of the highest order, translated into all official languages, can contribute to Zulu lexical semantics with English as pivot language
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