Generation of segmented isiZulu text

Abstract

The complex morphology, conjunctive orthography and widespread occurrence of morphophonological alternation in the Nguni languages have given rise to several efforts towards morphological segmentation of tokens of Nguni languages. For supervised methods, annotated data is required, which currently exists as canonically segmented data in the NCHLT corpus and surface segmented data in the Ukwabelana corpus. In this paper, we present a method and segmentation strategy based on a computational grammar for isiZulu. The grammar, which itself has some limitations in processing speed and robustness to unexpected input, is used to create a new set of segmentations for the tokens of the Ukwabelana corpus.