This paper provides a semantic analysis of the D(eterminer)-system in Nata (Eastern Bantu), and compares it with strikingly similar D-system St’át’imcets (Salish). Our core proposal is that both languages, major distinction encoded by Ds correlates presence vs. absence speaker commitment to existence referent for noun phrase.We show neither nor encode well-known distinctions like definiteness o...

1. INTRODUCTION. Most Bantu languages have a set of highly productive verbal deriva-tional suffixes which alter the argument structure and semantics of basic verb roots. 1 One example of such a suffix is the Causative, which gives a verb stem causative semantics and allows it to take an extra causer argument. A prototypical instance of the use of the Causative, drawn from Chichewa (Baker 1988:1...

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...

Background: Molecular genetic factors regulating hemoglobin F (Hb F) expression are important modifiers of the severity of sickle cell anemia (SS). Methods: The prevalence of XmnI polymorphic site, the Gg:Ag ratio and the Hb F level were determined using PCR-RFLP procedure, HPLC and alkaline denaturation method, respectively, in various haplotypes of 52 patients with SS, 18 patients with sickle...

Recent scientific publications on data-driven part-of-speech tagging of Sub-Saharan African languages have reported encouraging accuracy scores, using off-the-shelf tools and often fairly limited amounts of training data. Unfortunately, no research efforts exist that explore which type of linguistic features contribute to accurate part-of-speech tagging for the languages under investigation. Th...

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...

This paper presents two Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for Bayesian inference of probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs) from terminal strings, providing an alternative to maximum-likelihood estimation using the Inside-Outside algorithm. We illustrate these methods by estimating a sparse grammar describing the morphology of the Bantu language Sesotho, demonstrating that with sui...