Intellectualization through Terminology Development

The term intellectualization was famously used in the Prague School to describe a process that a language undergoes in its development and refinement. In our South African context intellectualization entails a carefully planned process of hastening the cultivation and growth of indigenous official African languages so that they effectively function in all higher domains as languages of teaching and learning,  research, science and technology. This article critically exam-ines the terminology development process that is being driven at the University of KwaZulu-Natal  (henceforth UKZN) as one of the key agents of language intellectualization. The  article critically evaluates the UKZN terminology development model that is used to harvest, consult and authenti-cate isiZulu terminology for Administration,  Architecture, Anatomy, Computer Science, Environ-mental Science, Law, Physics,  Psychology, and Nursing disciplines. Outflow platforms for the ter-minology in this development model are loosely listed as the 'database' and the 'development  platform' but there is no clear end-user platform for students and lecturers, who  seem to be the main end-user-targets of the whole terminology development  initiative. The article will propose an improved model to cater for AnyTime Access, which is convenient for student needs between lec-tures, and improve the  harvesting mechanism in the existing model.Keywords: Intellectualization, Terminology Development, Harvesting,   Crowdsourcing, Consultation, Verification, Authentication, Anytime Acces

Semi-automatic Term Extraction for an isiZulu Linguistic Terms Dictionary

The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is compiling a series of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) dictionaries for various specialized subject domains in line with its language policy and plan. The focus in this paper is the term extraction for words in the linguistics subject domain. This paper advances the use of frequency analysis and the keyword analysis as strategies to extract terms for the compilation of the dictionary of isiZulu linguistic terms. The study uses the isiZulu National Corpus (INC) of about 1,2 million tokens as a reference corpus as well as an LSP corpus of about 100,000 tokens as a study corpus. The study is analyzed through the use of a software tool called WordSmith Tools (version 6). WordSmith Tools (hence forth WS Tools) is an integrated suite of three main programs, which include the WordList, Concord and Keywords, used in analysing words and word patterns in any given text. Using the WS Tools software a lot of qualitative and quantitative research can be done in the language. Central to this study is a computational determination of which words are typical of the linguistic domain in isiZulu and therefore stand out as preferred candidates for headword selection. Thus the study uses the corpus linguistics method as a basis for theoretical analysis. The advantage of such a theoretical approach is that a corpus is stored and queried by means of computer and computer software, which makes it easy to find, sort and count items, either as a basis for linguistic description or for addressing language-related issues and problems. Using the WS Tools software, the study shows that term extraction for the isiZulu dictionary of linguistic terms is done following reliable computational techniques in corpus lexicography.Keywords: Term extraction, LGP corpus, LSP corpus, wordsmith tools, frequency, wordlist, concord, keyness, lexicography, corpus lexicography, headword selection, LSP dictionar

Advancing Teaching Innovation and Research Excellence in Higher Education

The theme of this special edition derives from the 10th Annual Teaching and Learning Conference, which focussed on advancing teaching innovation and research excellence in higher education. We were privileged to have hosted one of the world’s most eminent scholars of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), Lee Shuman. Offering profound insights into the intersection of research and practice within the landscape of the Academy, Shulman asked: ‘What is “evidence” for the improvement of teaching and learning in an unscripted and highly contextualized world?’ He argued that ‘whether describing good medical practice, educational design, or management in business, experts insist that judgments and decisions are evidence-based’.Setting up for scrutiny the distinctions amongst evidence, conjecture, speculation, anecdote or fantasy, he challenged us to consider how we use, acquire, create or defend what counts as ‘evidence’ in our pedagogies and our designs. The question of evidence is particularly relevant in the context of challenging the archetypical university teacher who is expected to conduct research, teach, and perform community service. As teaching rises beyond the status of the ‘poor cousin’ of research, academics increasingly have an obligetion to make public the ‘evidence’ that characterises teaching excellence. Performance metrics no longer suffice as indicators of excellence, nor do self-study narratives

On the ontology of part-whole relations in Zulu language and culture

Parthood and attendant part-whole relations enjoy interest in ontology authoring for various subject domains, as well as in, e.g., NLP to understand text. The list of common part-whole relations is occasionally slightly modified for languages other than English. For isiZulu, it was shown that there are not always 1:1 mappings and, moreover, dictionaries list many more translations for parthood and part-whole relations. This complicates selecting the semantically appropriate ones for localising ontologies or aligning local ontologies to other ones. It also raises the question whether the ‘common’ part-whole relations are really that common. We aim to investigate the extant part-whole relations in isiZulu and determine their ontological status.We harvested a lexicon of 81 terms from dictionaries, which was reduced to 31 through several iterations of refinement, of which 13 were formalised and aligned to well-known part-whole relations. It showed that in some cases distinctions are made—and for which words exist—that have not been included before in part-whole relations, yet in other cases it is more coarse-grained; e.g., a parthood for portions of cloth, for objects properly contained in the mouth, and for regions with a part-region that has a fiat boundary and objects located in it

Contextualising Levels of Language Resourcedness affecting Digital Processing of Text

Application domains such as digital humanities and tool like chatbots involve some form of processing natural language, from digitising hardcopies to speech generation. The language of the content is typically characterised as either a low resource language (LRL) or high resource language (HRL), also known as resource-scarce and well-resourced languages, respectively. African languages have been characterized as resource-scarce languages (Bosch et al. 2007; Pretorius & Bosch 2003; Keet & Khumalo 2014) and English is by far the most well-resourced language. Varied language resources are used to develop software systems for these languages to accomplish a wide range of tasks. In this paper we argue that the dichotomous typology LRL and HRL for all languages is problematic. Through a clear understanding of language resources situated in a society, a matrix is developed that characterizes languages as Very LRL, LRL, RL, HRL and Very HRL. The characterization is based on the typology of contextual features for each category, rather than counting tools, and motivation is provided for each feature and each characterization. The contextualisation of resourcedness, with a focus on African languages in this paper, and an increased understanding of where on the scale the language used in a project is, may assist in, among others, better planning of research and implementation projects. We thus argue in this paper that the characterization of language resources within a given scale in a project is an indispensable component particularly in the context of low-resourced languages

On the verbalization patterns of part-whole relations in isiZulu

In the highly multilingual setting in South Africa, developing computational tools to support the 11 official languages will facilitate effective communication. The exigency to develop these tools for healthcare applications and doctor-patient interaction is there. An important component in this set-up is generating sentences in the language isiZulu, which involves part-whole relations to communicate, for instance, which part of one's body hurts. From a NLG viewpoint, the main challenge is the fluid use of terminology and the consequent complex agreement system inherent in the language, which is further complicated by phonological conditioning in the linguistic realisation stage. Through using a combined approach of examples and various literature, we devised verbalisation patterns for both meronymic and mereological relations, being structural/general parthood, involvement, containment, membership, subquantities, participation, and constitution. All patterns were then converted into algorithms and have been implemented as a proof-of-concept

Grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb

The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject of on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb are (and, by extension, the Bantu verb morphology). To this end, we iteratively specify the grammar as a Context Free Grammar, and evaluate it computationally. The grammar presented in this paper covers the subject and object concords, negation, present tense, aspect, mood, and the causative, applicative, stative, and the reciprocal verbal extensions, politeness, the wh-question modifiers, and aspect doubling, ensuring their correct order as they appear in verbs. The grammar conforms to specification

Basics for a grammar engine to verbalize logical theories in isiZulu

The language isiZulu is the largest in South Africa by numbers of first language speakers, yet, it is still an underresourced language. In this paper, we approach the grammar piecemeal from a natural language generation approach, and viewed from a potential utility for verbalizing OWL ontologies as a tangible use case. The elaborate rules of the grammar show that a grammar engine and dictionary is essential even for basic verbalizations in OWL 2 EL. This is due to, mainly, the 17 noun classes with embedded semantics and the agglutinative nature of isiZulu. The verbalization of basic constructs requires merging a prefix with a noun and distinguishing an `and' between a list and linking clauses

Evaluation of the effects of a spellchecker on the intellectualization of isiZulu

Through its bilingual language policy and plan that recognises English and isiZulu as official languages of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), UKZN has aggressively promoted the intellectualisation of isiZulu as an effective strategy in advancing indigenous, under-resourced African languages as vehicles for innovation, science, and technology research in Higher Education and Training institutions. UKZN recently launched human language technologies (HLTs) in isiZulu as enablers towards the intellectualisation of the language. One of these is an isiZulu spellchecker, which was trained on an organic isiZulu National Corpus. We evaluate the isiZulu spellchecker’s effects on the intellectualisation of isiZulu. Two surveys were conducted with the target end-users, consisting of relevant questions and the System Usability Scale, and an analysis of words added to the spellchecker. It is evident that the spellchecker has had a positive impact on the work of target end-users, who also perceive it as an enabler in the intellectualisation of isiZulu. The survey responses show modest success for a first version of the tool. The analysis of the words added to the spellchecker indicates that new words are being added to the isiZulu lexicon

Toward a knowledge-to-text controlled natural language of isiZulu

The language isiZulu belongs to the Nguni group of languages, which also include isiXhosa, isiNdebele and siSwati. Of the four Nguni languages, isiZulu is the most dominant language in South Africa, which is spoken by 22.7\% of the country's 51.8 million population. However, isiZulu (and even more so the other Nguni languages) still remains an under-resourced language for software applications. In this article we focus on controlled natural languages for structured knowledge-to-text viewed from a potential utility for verbalising business rules and OWL ontologies. IsiZulu grammar---and by extension, all Bantu languages---shows that a template-based approach is infeasible. This is due to, mainly, the noun class system, the agglutination and verb conjugation with concords for each noun class. We present verbalisation patterns for existential and universal quantification, taxonomic subsumption, axioms with simple properties, and basic cases of negation. Based on the preliminary user assessment of the patterns, selected ones are refined into algorithms for verbalisation to generate correct isiZulu sentences, which have been evaluated