Abstract
There are compelling reasons for a Controlled Natural Language of isiZulu in software applications, which requires pluralising nouns. Only ‘canonical’ singular/plural pairs exist, however, which are insufficient for computational use of isiZulu. Starting from these rules, we take an experimental approach as virtuous spiral to refine the rules by repeatedly testing two test sets against successive versions of refined rules for pluralisation. This resulted in the elucidation of additional pluralisation rules not included in typical isiZulu textbooks and grammar resources and motivated design choices for algorithm development. We assessed the potential for reuse of the approach and the type of deviations with Runyankore, which demonstrated encouraging results.
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Acknowledgements
This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (CMK: Grant Number 93397), and by the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) Research School in CS4A at the University of Cape Town (JB).
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Byamugisha, J., Keet, C.M., Khumalo, L. (2018). Pluralising Nouns in isiZulu and Related Languages. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9623. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75477-2_18
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