Lexical and Grammar Resource Engineering for Runyankore & Rukiga: A Symbolic Approach

Current research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) requires the existence of language resources. Whereas these resources are available for a few well-resourced languages, there are many languages that have been neglected. Among the neglected and / or under-resourced languages are Runyankore and Rukiga (henceforth referred to as Ry/Rk). Recently, the NLP community has started to acknowledge that resources for under-resourced languages should also be given priority. Why? One reason being that as far as language typology is concerned, the few well-resourced languages do not represent the structural diversity of the remaining languages. The central focus of this thesis is about enabling the computational analysis and generation of utterances in Ry/Rk. Ry/Rk are two closely related languages spoken by about 3.4 and 2.4 million people respectively. They belong to the Nyoro-Ganda (JE10) language zone of the Great Lakes, Narrow Bantu of the Niger-Congo language family.The computational processing of these languages is achieved by formalising the grammars of these two languages using Grammatical Framework (GF) and its Resource Grammar Library (RGL). In addition to the grammar, a general-purpose computational lexicon for the two languages is developed. Although we utilise the lexicon to tremendously increase the lexical coverage of the grammars, the lexicon can be used for other NLP tasks.In this thesis a symbolic / rule-based approach is taken because the lack of adequate languages resources makes the use of data-driven NLP approaches unsuitable for these languages

ICT and applied linguistics – A project approach

This workshop discusses and shows examples of student-created ICT projects developed as part of Applied Linguistics coursework. A “Top 20 Site Search” asked students to select sites to recommend to other (novice) teachers of English. Besides student learning resources, they also located resources of use to teachers for lesson planning, test development, and so on. A similar project was conducted with students in a graduate Materials Design course. Students submitted their top sites, which were compiled and made available on web CT. In class, they took turns showing the best features of their favorite sites. Perhaps the best example of learner motivation linked to IT comes from undergraduate courses in first and second language acquisition. Although not explicitly asked to use IT, the better projects integrated digital video clips so as to show samples collected during their research. Another example is a fieldwork “scrapbook” presented via Power Point. It is clear that students went well beyond the requirements of the assignment when implementing and presenting their projects. IT was obviously a valuable tool and even a motivator for students as they explored language learning issues, processes and concepts