Tense and Aspect in Runyankore Using a Context-Free Grammar

The provision of personalized patient information has been encouraged as a means of complementing information provided during patient-doctor consultations, and linked to better health outcomes through patient compliance with prescribed treatments. The generation of such texts as a controlled fragment of Runyankore, a Bantu language indigenous to Uganda, requires the appropriate tense and aspect, as well as a method for verb conjugation. We present how an analysis of corpora of explanations of prescribed medications was used to identify the simple present tense and progressive aspect as appropriate for our selected domain. A CFG is defined to conjugate and generate the correct form of the verb.