Bootstrapping Language Description: the case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic)
Harald Hammarström, Christina Thornell, Malin Petzell, Torbjörn Westerlund
Abstract
Linguists have long been producing grammatical decriptions of yet undescribed languages. This is a time-consuming process, which has already adapted to improved technology for recording and storage. We present here a novel application of NLP techniques to bootstrap analysis of collected data and speed-up manual selection work. To be more precise, we argue that unsupervised induction of morphology and part-of-speech analysis from raw text data is mature enough to produce useful results. Experiments with Latent Semantic Analysis were less fruitful. We exemplify this on Mpiemo, a so-far essentially undescribed Bantu language of the Central African Republic, for which raw text data was available.- Anthology ID:
- L08-1229
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2008
- Address:
- Marrakech, Morocco
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/848_paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Harald Hammarström, Christina Thornell, Malin Petzell, and Torbjörn Westerlund. 2008. Bootstrapping Language Description: the case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic). In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Bootstrapping Language Description: the case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic) (Hammarström et al., LREC 2008)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/848_paper.pdf