Lexical and Grammar Resource Engineering for Runyankore & Rukiga: A Symbolic Approach
Licentiate thesis, 2021
The central focus of this thesis is about enabling the computational analysis and generation of utterances in Ry/Rk. Ry/Rk are two closely related languages spoken by about 3.4 and 2.4 million people respectively. They belong to the Nyoro-Ganda (JE10) language zone of the Great Lakes, Narrow Bantu of the Niger-Congo language family.
The computational processing of these languages is achieved by formalising the grammars of these two languages using Grammatical Framework (GF) and its Resource Grammar Library (RGL). In addition to the grammar, a general-purpose computational lexicon for the two languages is developed. Although we utilise the lexicon to tremendously increase the lexical coverage of the grammars, the lexicon can be used for other NLP tasks.
In this thesis a symbolic / rule-based approach is taken because the lack of adequate languages resources makes the use of data-driven NLP approaches unsuitable for these languages.
Computational Grammar
Runyankore
Grammar Resource
Grammatical Framework
Lexical Resource
Computational lexicon
Rukiga
Bantu Languages
Runyakitara
Resource Grammar Library
Language Resources
Grammar Engineering
Author
David Bamutura
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Functional Programming
Towards computational resource grammars for runyankore and rukiga
LREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings,;(2020)p. 2846-2854
Paper in proceeding
Bamutura, Sabiiti David 2021 "Ry/Rk-Lex: A computational lexicon for Runyankore and Rukiga languages" Accepted to the Northern European Association for Language Technology post-proceeding series of the Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC 2020)
Areas of Advance
Information and Communication Technology
Driving Forces
Sustainable development
Innovation and entrepreneurship
Subject Categories
Language Technology (Computational Linguistics)
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Specific Languages
Publisher
Chalmers
CSE EDIT 8103 and online via Zoom
Opponent: Dr. Wanjiku Ng'ang'a, School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, Kenya