Publications

Publication details [#8039]

Pretorius, L. and S. E. Bosch. 2003. Finite-state computational morphology: an analyzer prototype for Zulu. Machine Translation 18 (3) : 195–216.
Publication type
Article in jnl/bk
Publication language
English
Source language

Abstract

Zulu is spoken by approximately 9 million people. It forms part of a language family, which is characterized by rich agglutinating morphological structures. This paper discusses a prototype of a computational morphological analyzer for Zulu, built by means of the Xerox finite-state tools, in particular lexc and xfst. In addition to considering both the morphotactics, and the morphophonological alternation rules that apply, the focus is on implementation and other issues that need to be resolved in order to produce a useful software artefact for automated morphological analysis. The current status of the prototype is alluded to by providing morphological scope, that is the various word categories (parts of speech) that may be handled, and the lexical coverage in terms of the number of different Zulu roots that are included in the embedded lexicon of the analyzer. Preliminary testing and validation procedures are briefly discussed.
Source : Based on abstract in journal