Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype For Zulu

  • Published:
Machine Translation

Abstract

As one of the largest of the 11 official languages of South Africa, 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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.

References

  • Jens. Allwood Grönqvist. Leif A.P. Hendrikse (2003) ArticleTitle‘Developing a Tag Set and Tagger for the African Languages of Southern Africa with Special Reference to Xhosa’ Journal of Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 21 223–237

    Google Scholar 

  • Ken. Beesley Karttunen Lauri (2003) Finite-state Morphology CSLI Publications Stanford, CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Erjavec, Tomaž (ed.): (2004), The MULTEXT-East Morphosyntactic Specifications Version 3.0, available at http://nl.ijs.si/ME/V3/msd/msd.pdf, accessed 14/10/2004.

  • A. Hurskainen (1992) ArticleTitle‘A Two-Level Formalism for the Analysis of Bantu Morphology: An Application to Swahili’ Nordic Journal of African Studies. 1 87–122

    Google Scholar 

  • Karttunen Lauri. (2003). ‘Computing with Realizational Morphology’, in Alexander Gelbukh (ed.), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, 4th International Conference, CICLing 2003, Mexico City, Mexico, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2588, Berlin; Springer, pp. 203–214.

  • L. Karttunen K. Oflazer (2000) ArticleTitle‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Finite-State Methods in NLP’ Computational Linguistics 26 1–2 Occurrence Handle10.1162/089120100561593

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McEnery, Tony, Lou Burnard, Andrew Wilson and Baker [sic]: (1998), Validation of Morphosyntactic Analyses, available at http://www.elra.info/services/valid/wp3/MORPH.htm, accessed on 10/3/2003.

  • C. Meinhof (1932) Introduction to the Phonology of the Bantu Languages Dietrich Reimer/Ernst Vohse Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  • Oflazer, Kemal and Sharon Inkelas: (2003), ‘A Finite-State Pronunciation Lexicon for Turkish’, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Finite-state Methods in Natural Language Processing, 10th Conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 11–18.

  • G. Poulos C.T. Msimang (1998) A Linguistic Analysis of Zulu Via Afrika Pretoria

    Google Scholar 

  • R. Schach Steven (2002) Object-oriented and Classical Software Engineering EditionNumber5 McGraw Hill Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Silberztein, M.: (1999), ‘INTEX 4.1 for Windows:a Walkthrough’, in J. M. Champarnaud, D. Maurel and D. Ziadi (eds), Automata Implementation, Third International Workshop on Implementing Automata, WIA’98, Rouen, France, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1660, Berlin: Springer, pp. 230–243.

  • Sproat, Richard: (2003), Lextools: a toolkit for finite-state linguistic analysis, AT&T Labs-Research, available online at http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/lextools/, accessed 3/10/2003.

  • Talmon, Rafi and Shuly Wintner: (2003), ‘Morphological Tagging of the Qur’an’, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Finite-state Methods in Natural Language Processing, 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 67–74.

  • Úi Dhonnchadha, Elaine: (2003), ‘Finite-State Morphology and Irish’, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Finite-state Methods in Natural Language Processing, 10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary, pp. 43–50.

  • Van Noord, G.: (2002), FSA6.2xx: Finite State Automata Utilities, available online at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/Fsa/fsa.html, accessed 3/10/2003.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of South Africa, PO Box 392, 0003, Pretoria, UNISA, South Africa

    Laurette Pretorius & Sonja E. Bosch

Authors
  1. Laurette Pretorius
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Sonja E. Bosch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laurette Pretorius.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Pretorius, L., Bosch, S.E. Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype For Zulu. Mach Translat 18, 195–216 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-004-2477-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-004-2477-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation