Morphological Synthesizer for Ge’ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations

Gebrearegawi Gebremariam Gidey, Hailay Kidu Teklehaymanot, Gebregewergs Mezgebe Atsbha


Abstract
Ge’ez is an ancient Semitic language renowned for its unique alphabet. It serves as the script for numerous lan- guages, including Tigrinya and Amharic, and played a pivotal role in Ethiopia’s cultural and religious development during the Aksumite kingdom era. Ge’ez remains significant as a liturgical language in Ethiopia and Eritrea, with much of the national identity documentation recorded in Ge’ez. These written materials are invaluable primary sources for studying Ethiopian and Eritrean philosophy, creativity, knowledge, and civilization. Ge’ez is a complex morphological structure with rich inflectional and derivational morphology, and no usable NLP has been developed and published until now due to the scarcity of annotated linguistic data, corpora, labeled datasets, and lexicons. Therefore, we proposed a rule-based Ge’ez morphological synthesis to generate surface words from root words according to the morphological structures of the language. Consequently, we proposed an automatic morphological synthesizer for Ge’ez using TLM. We used 1,102 sample verbs, representing all verb morphological structures, to test and evaluate the system. Finally, we get a performance of 97.4%. This result outperforms the baseline model, suggesting that other scholars build a comprehensive system considering morphological variations of the language. Keywords: Ge’ez, NLP, morphology, morphological synthesizer, rule-based
Anthology ID:
2024.rail-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Rooweither Mabuya, Muzi Matfunjwa, Mmasibidi Setaka, Menno van Zaanen
Venues:
RAIL | WS
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Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
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Pages:
94–106
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.rail-1.11
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Cite (ACL):
Gebrearegawi Gebremariam Gidey, Hailay Kidu Teklehaymanot, and Gebregewergs Mezgebe Atsbha. 2024. Morphological Synthesizer for Ge’ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 94–106, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Morphological Synthesizer for Ge’ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations (Gidey et al., RAIL-WS 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.rail-1.11.pdf