As one of the largest of the 11 official languages of South Africa, Zulu is spoken by approximately 9 million people. It forms part of a language family which is characterized by rich agglutinating morphological structures. This paper discusses a prototype of a computational morphological analyzer for Zulu, built by means of the Xerox finite state tools, in particular lexc and xfst. In addition to considering both the morphotactics and the morphophonological alternation rules that apply, the focus is on implementation and other issues that need to be resolved in order to produce a useful software artefact for automated morphological analysis. The current status of the prototype is alluded to by providing morphological scope, that is the various word categories (parts of speech) that may be handled, and the lexical coverage in terms of the number of different Zulu roots that are included in the embedded lexicon of the analyzer. Preliminary testing and validation procedures are briefly discussed.
The advent of the Information Age and global connectivity has placed ethics center stage in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). As the drive towards the establishment of a socalled IT profession gains momentum, ethical conduct and codes of ethics have recently been formulated and introduced formally. Initiatives in this regard can be attributed to, among others, the ACM and the IEEE. Of particular significance is the ImpactCS Project commissioned by the joint taskforce of the ACM and IEEE, and funded by the USA's National Science Foundation. The increased globalization and inherent nature of ICT transcend physical and cultural borders, making it increasingly difficult to enforce accepted laws, regulations, and codes of conduct. It is thus the responsibility of Computer Science and Information Systems instructors to teach and instill professional values and ethical analysis skills in each and every student. Therefore, we investigate some issues pertaining to the teaching of computer ethics. We conclude this paper by presenting a possible framework to be used in the teaching of computer ethics, and apply this framework to our own institution.
The development of finite-state morphological analyser prototypes for a variety of languages belonging to the Bantu language family, based on underlying machine-readable lexicons that conform to common lexical specifications and international standards.
This paper investigates the possibilities that cross-linguistic similarities and dissimilarities between related languages offer in terms of bootstrapping a morphological analyser. In this case an existing Zulu morphological analyser prototype (ZulMorph) serves as basis for a Xhosa analyser. The investigation is structured around the morphotactics and the morphophonological alternations of the languages involved. Special attention is given to the so-called "open" class, which represents the word root lexicons for specifically nouns and verbs. The acquisition and coverage of these lexicons prove to be crucial for the success of the analysers under development. The bootstrapped morphological analyser is applied to parallel test corpora and the results are discussed. A variety of cross-linguistic effects is illustrated with examples from the corpora. It is found that bootstrapping morphological analysers for languages that exhibit significant structural and lexical similarities may be fruitfully exploited for developing analysers for lesser-resourced languages.
In today's digital multilingual world, language technology is crucial for providing access to information and opportunities for economic development. With approximately two thousand different languages, Africa is a multilingual continent par excellence, presenting acute challenges for those seeking to promote and use African languages in the areas of business development, education and relief aid. In recent times a number of researchers and institutions, both from Africa and elsewhere, have come forward to share the common goal of developing capabilities in language technology for African languages. In 2009 and 2010, the first two workshops on African Language Technology were organized (De Pauw et al. 2009, 2010a as a forum to bring together a wide range of researchers working in this domain.
This article describes corporatist tendencies in South Africa and attempts an assessment of the future of corporatism in the country. Attention is given to general features of relations between state, capital and labour. The prospects for corporatism are explored by reviewing the history of corporatism in South Africa and by considering the views of activists and analysts, as well as salient structural features of institutions for interest representation and the participating organizations.
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