BANTU SPEECH: A PHILOLOGICAL STUDY

Resource-Light Bantu Part-of-Speech Tagging

Recent scientific publications on data-driven part-of-speech tagging of Sub-Saharan African languages have reported encouraging accuracy scores, using off-the-shelf tools and often fairly limited amounts of training data. Unfortunately, no research efforts exist that explore which type of linguistic features contribute to accurate part-of-speech tagging for the languages under investigation. Th...

Building Corpora for the Philological Study of Swiss Legal Texts

We describe the construction of two corpora in the domain of Swiss legal texts: The DS21 corpus is based on the Collection of Swiss Law Sources and contains historical legal texts from the early Middle Ages up to 1798; the Swiss Legislation Corpus (SLC) is based on the Classified Compilation of Swiss Federal Legislation and contains all current Swiss federal laws. The paper summarizes the key p...

WWW Access to a Philological Application

Our project enhances the accessibility of ancient manuscripts and provide new ways of working with them through a Web server. More precisely, we aim to produce a software tool allowing the historians, and more particularly codicologists and philologists, to read the manuscripts, write annotations, and navigate between the words of the transcription and the matching piece of image in the numeriz...

Constraining morphosyntactic templates: A case study of Bantu verbal suffixes

Towards a Part-of-Speech Ontology: Encoding Morphemic Units of Two South African Bantu Languages

This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It...