Automatic Sentence Parsing for Amharic Text an Experiment Using Probabilistic Context Free Grammars
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Date
2002-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Natural Language processing, as a field of scientific inquiry, plays an important role
in increasing computers capability to understand natural languages, the language
by which most human knowledge is recorded. Works in the area of Natural
Language Processing try to design and implement computer programs that can
understand natural language and act appropriately on the information contained in
the text or utterance. Enabling computers to understand natural language involves
extraction of meaning from natural language sentences. And one of the steps in
this process is sentence parsing.
Sentence parsing, which is also called syntactic parsing, is the process of
identifying how words can be put together to form correct sentences and
determining what structural role each word plays in the sentence and what phrases
are subparts of what other phrases. A sentence parser outputs a parse structure
that could be used as a component in many applications including semantic
analysis, machine translation, information storage and retrieval of textual data etc.
Today, parsers of different kinds (e.g. probabilistic, rule based) have been
developed for languages, which have relatively wider use nationally and/or
internationally (e .g. English, German, Chinese, etc). The same story is not true for
Amharic, the working language of the Federal Government of Ethiopia, and one of
the major languages of Ethiopia (Bender et al, 1976) since to the best of my
knowledge, there are no sentence parsers of any sort that process this language.
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Natural Language processing