Classifying Amharic News Text Using Self-Organizing Maps

The paper addresses using artificial neural networks for classification of Amharic news items. Amharic is the language for countrywide communication in Ethiopia and has its own writing system containing extensive systematic redundancy. It is quite dialectally diversified and probably representative of the languages of a continent that so far has received little attention within the language processing field. The experiments investigated document clustering around user queries using Self-Organizing Maps, an unsupervised learning neural network strategy. The best ANN model showed a precision of 60.0% when trying to cluster unseen data, and a 69.5% precision when trying to classify it

Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

Methods for Amharic part-of-speech tagging

The paper describes a set of experiments involving the application of three state-of- the-art part-of-speech taggers to Ethiopian Amharic, using three different tagsets. The taggers showed worse performance than previously reported results for Eng- lish, in particular having problems with unknown words. The best results were obtained using a Maximum Entropy ap- proach, while HMM-based and SVM- based taggers got comparable results

CLEF 2005: Ad Hoc track overview

We describe the objectives and organization of the CLEF 2005 ad hoc track and discuss the main characteristics of the tasks offered to test monolingual, bilingual and multilingual textual document retrieval. The performance achieved for each task is presented and a preliminary analysis of results is given. The paper focuses in particular on the multilingual tasks which reused the test collection created in CLEF 2003 in an attempt to see if an improvement in system performance over time could be measured, and also to examine the multilingual results merging problem

A Word Sense Disambiguation Model for Amharic Words using Semi-Supervised Learning Paradigm

The main objective of this research was to design a WSD (word sense disambiguation) prototype model for Amharic words using semi-supervised learning method to extract training sets which minimizes the amount of the required human intervention and it can produce considerable improvement in learning accuracy. Due to the unavailability of Amharic word net, only five words were selected. These words were atena (አጠና), derese (ደረሰ), tenesa (ተነሳ), bela (በላ) and ale (አለ). A separate data sets using five ambiguous words were prepared for the development of this Amharic WSD prototype. The final classification task was done on fully labelled training set using Adaboost, bagging, and AD tree classification algorithms on WEKA package.Keywords: Ambiguity Bootstrapping Word Sense disambiguatio

Classification of Under-Resourced Language Documents Using English Ontology

Automatic documents classification is an important task due to the rapid growth of the number of electronic documents, which aims automatically assign the document to a predefined category based on its contents. The use of automatic document classification has been plays an important role in information extraction, summarization, text retrieval, question answering, e-mail spam detection, web page content filtering, automatic message routing , etc.Most existing methods and techniques in the field of document classification are keyword based, but due to lack of semantic consideration of this technique, it incurs low performance. In contrast, documents also be classified by taking their semantics using ontology as a knowledge base for classification; however, it is very challenging of building ontology with under-resourced language. Hence, this approach is only limited to resourced language (i.e. English) support. As a result, under-resourced language written documents are not benefited such ontology based classification approach. This paper describes the design of automatic document classification of under-resourced language written documents. In this work, we propose an approach that performs classification of under-resourced language written documents on top of English ontology. We used a bilingual dictionary with Part of Speech feature for word-by-word text translation to enable the classification of document without any language barrier. The design has a concept-mapping component, which uses lexical and semantic features to map the translated sense along the ontology concepts. Beside this, the design also has a categorization component, which determines a category of a given document based on weight of mapped concept. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach 20-test documents for Amharic and Tigrinya and 15-test document for Afaan Oromo in each news category used. In order to observe the effect of incorporated features (i.e. lemma based index term selection, pre-processing strategies during concept mapping, lexical and semantics based concept mapping) five experimental techniques conducted. The experimental result indicated that the proposed approach with incorporation of all features and components achieved an average F-measure of 92.37%, 86.07% and 88.12% for Amharic, Afaan Oromo and Tigrinya documents respectively. Keywords: under-resourced language, Multilingual, Documents or text Classification, knowledge base, Ontology based text categorization, multilingual text classification, Ontology. DOI: 10.7176/CEIS/10-6-02 Publication date:July 31st 201

Optical Character Recognition of Amharic Documents

In Africa around 2,500 languages are spoken. Some of these languages have their own indigenous scripts. Accordingly, there is a bulk of printed documents available in libraries, information centers, museums and offices. Digitization of these documents enables to harness already available information technologies to local information needs and developments. This paper presents an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for converting digitized documents in local languages. An extensive literature survey reveals that this is the first attempt that report the challenges towards the recognition of indigenous African scripts and a possible solution for Amharic script. Research in the recognition of African indigenous scripts faces major challenges due to (i) the use of large number characters in the writing and (ii) existence of large set of visually similar characters. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction scheme using principal component and linear discriminant analysis, followed by a decision directed acyclic graph based support vector machine classifier. Recognition results are presented on real-life degraded documents such as books, magazines and newspapers to demonstrate the performance of the recognizer