Design and Development of Amharic Word Parser
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Date
2000-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Most of the human knowledge is recorded using natural language. This language is too complex
to be understood by computers. Only computers that have the capability to understand Natural
language can access all these information efficiently. in addition, Natural Language interfaces to
computers would allow complex systems to he accessible to everyone.
Activities in the area of Natural Language Process ing tries to design and implement computer
programs that can understand Natu ral I"anguagc and act appropriate ly on the infol111ation
contained in the text or utterance. Enabl ing computers to understand natural language involves
extraction of mea ning from words in texts. Word parsing is a process of extracting the meaning
expressed by the 0rds of a text by to kenis in words to their basic components.
This study is an attempt o f des igning and implementing word parser for Amhari c words. The
study focuses on Amhari c verbs illldthe ir derivations, which covers more th an 75% of the words
in the language. The paper describes the morpho logy of Amharic verbs and attempts to extract
features that enables to implement automattc Amhari c word parser. The morphological data
described and analyses in this study is taken from study outputs in the area of Amharic word
morphology.
An algorithm that can use the morphological property of the language has been designed and
presented. Even tho ugh this studly focuses on Amharic verbs and their derivations the algorithm
and the discuss ion can be easily ext ended I(lr other word groups. The study also describes the
information contained in affixes and designs a database that can hold this information for word
parsing and further analysis works.
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Keywords
Design and Development, Amharic Word Parser