Statistical unicodification of African languages

La Gestion de la Diversité Linguistique dans les Villes Africaines/Management of Linguistic Diversity in African Urban Cities, Gabriel Mba & Etienne Sadembouo (Eds.). (2012), L’Harmattan, ISBN 978-2-296-99091-3

A Literary Anthroponomastics of Three Selected African Novels: A Cross Cultural Perspective

Names as markers of identity are a source of a wide variety of information. This paper explores the names of characters to show the sociocultural factors which influence the choice of names and the effects that the names of these characters have on the roles they play. Using a variety of personal names from Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, a...

Lexical Semantics and Selection of TAM in Bantu Languages: A Case of Semantic Classification of Kiswahili Verbs

The existing literature on Bantu verbal semantics demonstrated that inherent semantic content of verbs pairs directly with the selection of tense, aspect and modality formatives in Bantu languages like Chasu, Lucazi, Lusamia, and Shiyeyi. Thus, the gist of this paper is the articulation of semantic classification of verbs in Kiswahili based on the selection of TAM types. This is because the sem...

Identity and Representation through Language in Ghana: The Postcolonial Self and the Other

Research related to colonialism and post colonialism shows how the identities of indigenous people were constructed and how these identities are reconstructed in our contemporary world. The thrust of this paper is that colonialism brought a shift in the linguistic structure of Ghana with the introduction of the use of English among Ghanaians. The coexistence of both Ghanaian languages and Engli...

Exploring unsupervised word segmentation for machine translation in the South African context

We explore the application of unsupervised word segmentation algorithms to phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems, translating from English to four South African languages: Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tsonga and Zulu. Positive results in terms of the standard BLEU and NIST scores are obtained for systems translating into Afrikaans and Zulu.