A Morphological Analyzer For Wolof Using Finite-State Techniques

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a morphological analyzer for Wolof. The main motivation for this work is to obtain a linguistically motivated tool using finite-state techniques. The finite-state technology is especially attractive in dealing with human language morphologies. Finite-state transducers (FST) are fast, efficient and can be fully reversible, enabling users to perform analysis as well as generation. Hence, I use this approach to construct a new FST tool for Wolof, as a first step towards a computational grammar for the language in the Lexical Functional Grammar framework. This article focuses on the methods used to model complex morphological issues and on developing strategies to limit ambiguities. It discusses experimental evaluations conducted to assess the performance of the analyzer with respect to various statistical criteria. In particular, I also wanted to create morphosyntactically annotated resources for Wolof, obtained by automatically analyzing text corpora with a computational morphology.