Work

A corpus-based survey of four electronic swahili–english bilingual dictionaries

Year: 2009

Type: article

Abstract: In this article we survey four different electronic bilingual dictionaries for the lan-guage pair Swahili–English. Aided by a data-driven morphological analyzer and part-of-speech tagger, we quantify the coverage of the dictionaries on large monolingual corpora of Swahili. In a second series of experiments, we investigate how applicable the dictionaries are as a tool in the development of a machine translation system, by evaluating bilingual coverage on the parallel SAWA corpus. At the same time we attempt to consolidate the dictionaries into a unified lexico-graphic database and compare the coverage to that of its composite parts. Keywords: lexicography, evaluation, morphology, lemmatization, parallel corpora, machine learning, machine translation, swahili (kiswahili), english

Source: Lexikos

DOI: 10.4314/lex.v19i1.49134

Authors: G De Pauw, G De Schryver, P Wagacha

Institutions: University of Nairobi, University of Antwerp, Ghent University, University of the Western Cape

Language: English

Topic: Lexicography and Language Studies

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $65

Funders: Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Universiteit Gent, Vlaamse regering