Summary of the paper
| Title | Bootstrapping Language Description: the case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic) |
|---|---|
| Authors | Harald Hammarström, Christina Thornell, Malin Petzell and 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. |
| Language | Single language |
| Topics | Acquisition, Machine Learning, Endangered languages, Language modelling |
Full paper |
Bootstrapping Language Description: the case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic) |
Slides |
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| Bibtex | @InProceedings{HAMMARSTRM08.848, author = {Harald Hammarström, Christina Thornell, Malin Petzell and Torbjörn Westerlund}, title = {Bootstrapping Language Description: the case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic)}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)}, year = {2008}, month = {may}, date = {28-30}, address = {Marrakech, Morocco}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair), Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {2-9517408-4-0}, note = {http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/}, language = {english} } |