Pluralizing Nouns across Agglutinating Bantu Languages

Joan Byamugisha, C. Maria Keet, Brian DeRenzi


Abstract
Text generation may require the pluralization of nouns, such as in context-sensitive user interfaces and in natural language generation more broadly. While this has been solved for the widely-used languages, this is still a challenge for the languages in the Bantu language family. Pluralization results obtained for isiZulu and Runyankore showed there were similarities in approach, including the need to combine syntax with semantics, despite belonging to different language zones. This suggests that bootstrapping and generalizability might be feasible. We investigated this systematically for seven languages across three different Guthrie language zones. The first outcome is that Meinhof’s 1948 specification of the noun classes are indeed inadequate for computational purposes for all examined languages, due to non-determinism in prefixes, and we thus redefined the characteristic noun class tables of 29 noun classes into 53. The second main result is that the generic pluralizer achieved over 93% accuracy in coverage testing and over 94% on a random sample. This is comparable to the language-specific isiZulu and Runyankore pluralizers.
Anthology ID:
C18-1223
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2633–2643
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1223
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joan Byamugisha, C. Maria Keet, and Brian DeRenzi. 2018. Pluralizing Nouns across Agglutinating Bantu Languages. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2633–2643, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pluralizing Nouns across Agglutinating Bantu Languages (Byamugisha et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1223.pdf