Browsing by Author "Kassa, Tadesse"

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    Development Journalism in Ethiopia: Examining the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation’s Watchdogging Role of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms
    (Addis Ababa Universty, 2005-06) Zegeye, Muluneh; Kassa, Tadesse
    The central focus of this study is on assessing the effects of the practice of ‘development journalism’ model of media functioning in the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation on its wider roles as a watchdog in the protection and enhancement of fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens. Specifically, this thesis attempts to assess the media policy of the country and the programs produced by EBC which fits the watchdogging role of fundamental rights and freedoms in their content with nine key informants’ ideas to show how the development journalism approach in practice has been affecting the quality of EBC’s presentation of human rights issues accurately and persistently. The study employed mixed approach, both qualitative and quantitative. The researcher used both primary and secondary sources of data. Primary data were elicited through in-depth interviews with key informants whereas secondary data were gathered from sources like books, articles, official documents and other pertinent publications. Selected programs produced by EBC-1 were also examined. After examining the ‘development journalism’ policy documents of a country, ascertaining the view of key informants, content analysis of selected programs of EBC-1 productions and other written documents, the study has come up with the following findings. The Ethiopian ‘development journalism’ policy document didn’t consider watchdogging role of the EBC (state media) as a noble role that media could play. It considered such media as instrument to achieve development. It framed EBC to stand with government policies and strategies, and initiate the public to participate in development endeavors of the government. The watchdogging role of fundamental rights and freedoms is negatively understood. Hence, most of program presentations in EBC are positively discharged, even though there are many defects in the country which needs to be covered. The EBC’s coverage of human rights issues and ability of entertain diverse opinion is weak. The approach of reporting is also top-down approach. However, the study also showed that EBC has been producing some productions which are playing role in protection and promotion of human rights like Aend Le Aend (one to one) program, and some sessions of its documentary series. But, such programs are subject to frequent interruption and change. Under this situation the challenges like, absence of editorial independence, inadequate budgeting for investigative programs, lack of professional journalists, self-censorship … preclude EBC from performing watchdogging role of fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens.
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    Morpheme-Based Bi-Directional Ge’ez -Amharic Machine Translation
    (Addis Ababa University, 2018-10-04) Kassa, Tadesse; Meshesha, Million (PhD)
    This study aims to explore the effect of morpheme level translation unit for bi-directional Ge’ez-Amharic machine translation. Using word as a translation unit is a problem in statistical machine translation while conducting translation between two morphologically rich languages such as Ge’ez and Amharic. At word level, data scarcity and unavailability of well prepared corpus is a challenge for under resourced language. And, at word level, it is difficult to manage many forms of a single word, not specific and lacks consistency. At morpheme level sub parts of words are specific, easy to manage specific parts and has consistency our many words of the same class. To conduct the experiment, parallel corpus was collected from online sources. Such Online sources include Old Testament of Holy bible and anaphora (or Kidase). The corpus include manually prepared bitext from Wedase Maryam, Anketse Berhane, yewedesewa melahekete, Kidan and Liton. To make the corpus suitable for the system, different preprocessing tasks such as tokenization, cleaning and normalization have been done. The data set contains a total of 13,833 simple and complex sentences, out of which 90% and 10% are used for training and testing, respectively. To build a language model for both languages we used 12, 450 parallel sentences. For both statistical and rule-based approachs we used Mosses for translation process, MGIZA++ for alignment of word and morpheme, morfessor and rules were used for morphological segmentation and IRSTLM for language modeling. After preparing and designing the prototype and the corpus, different experiments were conducted. Experimental results showed a better performance of 15.14% and 16.15% BLEU scores using morpheme-based from Geez to Amharic and from Amharic to Geez translation, respectively. As compared to word level translation there is on the average 6.77% and 7.73% improvement from Geez-Amharic and Amharic-Ge’ez respectively. This result further shows that morpheme-level translation performs better than word-level translation. As a result, using morpheme as a translation unit we conducted further experiment using unsupervised and rule-based morpheme segmentation approaches. Accordingly, the performance of rule-based morphological segmentation is better than unsupervised with an average BLEU score of 0.6% and 1.27% for Ge’ez to Amharic and Amharic to Ge’ez respectively. Alignments of Amharic and Ge’ez text have shown correspondence, such as one-one, one-to-many, many-one and many-many alignment. In this study, many-to-many alignment is the major challenge. So further research is needed to handle many-to-many, word order and morphology of the two languages.