A computational approach to Zulu verb morphology within the context of lexical semantics

The central research question that is addressed in this article is: How can ZulMorph, a finite state morphological analyser for Zulu, be employed to add value to Zulu lexical semantics with specific reference to Zulu verbs? The verb is the most complex word category in Zulu. Due to the agglutinative nature of Zulu morphology, limited information can be computationally extracted from running Zulu text without the support of  sufficiently reliable computational mor-phological analysis by means of which the  essential meanings of, amongst others, verbs can be exposed. In this article we describe a corpus-based approach to adding the English meaning to Zulu extended verb roots, thereby enhancing ZulMorph as a lexical knowledge base.Keywords: Zulu Verb Morphology, Verb Extensions, Lexical Semantics, Computational Morphological Analysis, Zulmorph, Zulu Lexical Knowl-Edge Base, Bitext

A Finite-State Approach to Linguistic Constraints in Zulu Morphological Analysis

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A Conceptual Model of the Research Methodology Domain

Recognising the need for the development of research capacity and changing learning paradigms that include online and collaborative approaches, an ontology of research methodology needs to be developed to allow for the shared creation of knowledge in this domain. An ontology engineering approach is followed in developing a conceptual model of the domain using UML, with a focus on studies in the computing disciplines. A research scheme that is made up of a philosophical world view, a research design, and research methods is proposed. Appropriate relations between these are identified, as well as attributes of the various concepts in the conceptual model. A focus group consisting of senior researchers in the field of computing was utilised to validate the model.School of Computin

Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer Prototype for Zulu

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.African Language

Agents, security and ethics: a framework for analysis

The domain of information security research is no longer exclusively of a technological nature as it has become permeated with aspects of human behaviour. Similarly the broad field of ethics is no longer only a human issue, as is reflected by the establishment of computing ethics as a separate research area. Advances in the past decade have led to the emergence of among others, new technologies, frameworks and methodologies in the field of computing. Examples include the Internet, global connectivity and agent technology - in particular intelligent agents. The attribute intelligentbrings with it a concomitant human characteristic that is assigned to an inanimate technological object. It is even plausible to think of communities of intelligent agents, inhabiting cyberspace, interacting with other agents, human users and hosts, and in this way developing a social life. This raises issues concerning information security as well as the ethical and social behaviour of intelligent agents. In this paper we thus briefly discuss agent computing and its impact on the environment in which it exists. In particular we focus on some relevant security and ethical issues associated with agent computing. The purpose of the paper is to present a framework within which the security and ethical behaviour of agents can be evaluated and analysed.Institute for Corporate Citizenshi

From <tiger2/> to ISOTiger – Community Driven Developments for Syntax Annotation in SynAF

International audienceIn 2010, ISO published a standard for syntactic annotation, ISO 24615:2010 (SynAF). Back then, the document specified a comprehensive reference model for the representation of syntactic annotations, but no accompanying XML serialisation. ISO's subcommittee on language resource management (ISO TC 37/SC 4) is working on making the SynAF serialisation ISOTiger an ad-ditional part of the standard. This contribution addresses the current state of development of ISOTiger, along with a number of open issues on which we are seeking community feedback in order to ensure that ISOTiger becomes a useful extension to the SynAF reference model

Multiple object agreement morphemes in Setswana: A computational approach

Setswana is an agglutinative language where prefixes and suffixes are extensively used in the formation of words. Words such as verbs, pronouns, adjectives and so on, which have a grammatical relationship with nouns in sentences, demonstrate agreement with such nouns by means of agreement morphemes. In certain instances verbs in Setswana sentences may take two objects. Both of these objects may be represented in the verb by object agreement morphemes. The result is that two object agreement morphemes may be prefixed to the verb. While the morphemes of the verb are presented systematically in Setswana grammars, the occurrence of multiple object agreement morphemes has received limited attention in the literature on Setswana linguistics. Similarly, this phenomenon has not yet been investigated from a computational morphological point of view. This article reports on (i) an example-based investigation towards a better and more complete understanding of the phenomenon of multiple object agreement morphemes as they appear in Setswana verbs, (ii) the modelling of these morphemes in an existing finite state tokeniser and computational morphological analyser for Setswana, and (iii) the novel role that a morphological analyser and its guesser variant can play in a corpus-based investigation of the phenomenon under discussion.Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2012, 30(2): 203&#8211;21

Towards Processable Afrikaans

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