Developing Text Resources for Ten South African Languages

Roald Eiselen, Martin Puttkammer


Abstract
The development of linguistic resources for use in natural language processing is of utmost importance for the continued growth of research and development in the field, especially for resource-scarce languages. In this paper we describe the process and challenges of simultaneously developing multiple linguistic resources for ten of the official languages of South Africa. The project focussed on establishing a set of foundational resources that can foster further development of both resources and technologies for the NLP industry in South Africa. The development efforts during the project included creating monolingual unannotated corpora, of which a subset of the corpora for each language was annotated on token, orthographic, morphological and morphosyntactic layers. The annotated subsets includes both development and test sets and were used in the creation of five core-technologies, viz. a tokeniser, sentenciser, lemmatiser, part of speech tagger and morphological decomposer for each language. We report on the quality of these tools for each language and discuss the importance of the resources within the South African context.
Anthology ID:
L14-1106
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3698–3703
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1151_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Roald Eiselen and Martin Puttkammer. 2014. Developing Text Resources for Ten South African Languages. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3698–3703, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Developing Text Resources for Ten South African Languages (Eiselen & Puttkammer, LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1151_Paper.pdf