Predicting Morphologically-Complex Unknown Words in Igbo

The effective handling of previously unseen words is an important factor in the performance of part-of-speech taggers. Some trainable POS taggers use suffix (sometimes prefix) strings as cues in handling unknown words (in effect serving as a proxy for actual linguistic affixes). In the context of creating a tagger for the African language Igbo, we compare the performance of some existing taggers, implementing such an approach, to a novel method for handling morphologically complex unknown words, based on morphological reconstruction (i.e. a linguistically-informed segmentation into root and affixes). The novel method outperforms these other systems by several percentage points, achieving accuracies of around 92 % on morphologically-complex unknown words

African Linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic Countries

Non peer reviewe

Language endangerment and language documentation in Africa

Non peer reviewe

A Grammar of Contemporary Igbo : Constituents, Features and Processes

In twenty-five chapters this book covers phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The chapters are organized in four discrete parts: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. They are uneven in terms of scope covered, length, the density of their contents and their degrees of difficulty. Each chapter ends with ?Some References? relevant to both the topic(s) treated in the chapter, in Igbo linguistics, and in general linguistics