oai:DiVA.org:uu-1266662010-08-25T14:00:43ZuuconferencePaperrefereedPUB

Bootstrapping Language Description: The case of Mpiemo (Bantu A, Central African Republic)http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-1266662008Hammarström, HaraldThornell, ChristinaPetzell, MalinWesterlund, TorbjörnLinguists 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.MpiemoBantu ACentral African RepublicNLPLatent Semantic AnalysisbootstrappingAfrican languagesAfrikanska språkComputational linguisticsDatorlingvistikenUppsala University, Department of Linguistics and PhilologyDepartment of Computing Science, Chalmers University, GothenburgDepartment of African Languages, Gothenburg University, GothenburgDepartment of African Languages, Gothenburg University, GothenburgConference papertexthttp://www.diva-portal.org/oai/ntnu/OAIoai:DiVA.org:uu-1266662010-06-30T05:17:00Zhttp://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/