Automatic Morphological Synthesizer for Afaan Oromoo
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2010-06
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Computational morphology is an important component of most natural language processing
tasks. Morphological generation, the process of returning one or more surface forms from a
sequence of underlying (lexical) forms, can provide fine-grained parts of speech information and
help resolve necessary syntactic agreements. In addition, morphological synthesis systems are
used as components in many applications, including machine translation, spell-checker, speech
recognition, dictionary (lexicon) compilation, POS tagging, morphological analysis,
conversational systems, automatic sentence construction and many others. Generally, the thesis
describes processes of automated morphological synthesis ranging from manually synthesizing
words to developing a prototype and conducting an experiment. The automated generation of
word forms avoids the storage of exhaustive lexicons and thereby saves memory requirement.
The devepment of such systems demand an in-depth study of the morphology of the language
used.
Morphological synthesizers have been developed for languages like English. But there is no such a
system for Afaan Oromoo, the working language of Oromia national regional sate, and one of the
major languages in Ethiopia. This study is, thus, an attempt to develop automatic morphological
synthesizer for Afaan Oromoo.
Algorithms that take the morphological properties of Afaan Oromoo into consideration are
developed from scratch and applied, as there are no previous such attempts. We employed rule based
computational model to design and develop the prototype referred to as HORSIISAA. The
performance of the system on average is 96.28% for verbs and 97.46% for nouns. The result
obtained encourages the undertaking of further research in the area, especially with the aim of
developing a full-fledged Afaan Oromoo morphological synthesizer.
Keywords: Morphology, Morphological synthesis, Natural language processing, Morphological
generation, Morphological processing, Afaan Oromoo, word forms
Description
Keywords
Morphology; Morphological Synthesis;Natural Language Processing; Morphological Generation; Morphological Processing; Afaan Oromoo; Word Forms