Daba: a model and tools for Manding corpora

This article provides a brief overview of Daba software package created in the course of building corpora for Manding languages. Key software features are motivated by the tasks and problems characteristic of many African languages. The corpus-building model proposed here was initially developed for Bambara Reference Corpus which is available online and is freely accessible. The morphological analysis procedure and corpus annotation scheme are discussed in detail. Daba uses a morpheme-based morphological annotation scheme inspired by the interlinear glossed form of presentation of linguistic examples. A scheme mapping Daba’s morpheme-based morphological information onto traditional word-based corpus annotation is provided. Since Bambara is characterized by a low level of written language standardization special attention is paid to the issues of representing variability in corpus annotation. Mots-clés : TALN, analyseur morphologique, langues manding, bambara, annotation du corpus.