This paper describes a proof-of-the-principle experiment in which maximum entropy learning is used for the automatic induction of shallow morphological features for the resourcescarce Bantu language of Gı̃kũyũ. This novel approach circumvents the limitations of typical unsupervised morphological induction methods that employ minimum-edit distance metrics to establish morphological similarity bet...

We describe the Lwazi corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR), a new telephone speech corpus which includes data from nine Southern Bantu languages. Because of practical constraints, the amount of speech per language is relatively small compared to major corpora in world languages, and we report on our investigation of the stability of the ASR models derived from the corpus. We also repor...