David Bamutura


2020

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Towards Computational Resource Grammars for Runyankore and Rukiga
David Bamutura | Peter Ljunglöf | Peter Nebende
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper, we present computational resource grammars of Runyankore and Rukiga (R&R) languages. Runyankore and Rukiga are two under-resourced Bantu Languages spoken by about 6 million people indigenous to South- Western Uganda, East Africa. We used Grammatical Framework (GF), a multilingual grammar formalism and a special- purpose functional programming language to formalise the descriptive grammar of these languages. To the best of our knowledge, these computational resource grammars are the first attempt to the creation of language resources for R&R. In Future Work, we plan to use these grammars to bootstrap the generation of other linguistic resources such as multilingual corpora that make use of data-driven approaches to natural language processing feasible. In the meantime, they can be used to build Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) applications for these languages among others.

2019

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Towards a Resource Grammar for Runyankore and Rukiga
David Bamutura | Peter Ljunglöf
Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP

Currently, there is a lack of computational grammar resources for many under-resourced languages which limits the ability to develop Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and applications such as Multilingual Document Authoring, Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Low-Coverage Machine Translation (MT) for these languages. In this paper, we present our attempt to formalise the grammar of two such languages: Runyankore and Rukiga. For this formalisation we use the Grammatical Framework (GF) and its Resource Grammar Library (GF-RGL).