TITLE:
Towards Kikamba Computational Grammar
AUTHORS:
Benson Kituku, Wanjiku Nganga, Lawrence Muchemi
KEYWORDS:
Grammar, Morphology, Syntax, Grammatical Framework, Under-Resourced language, Concord, Multilingual, Agglutination, Kikamba
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Data Analysis and Information Processing,
Vol.7 No.4,
October
22,
2019
ABSTRACT: The under-resourced Kikamba language has few language technology tools since the more efficient and popular data driven approaches for developing them suffer from data sparseness due to lack of digitized corpora. To address this challenge, we have developed a computational grammar for the Kikamba language within the multilingual Grammatical Framework (GF) toolkit. GF uses the Interlingua rule-based translation approach. To develop the grammar, we used the morphology driven strategy. Therefore, we first developed regular expressions for morphology inflection and thereafter developed the syntax rules. Evaluation of the grammar was done using one hundred sentences in both English and Kikamba languages. The results were an encouraging four n-gram BLEU score of 83.05% and the Position independent error rate (PER) of 10.96%. Finally, we have made a contribution to the language technology resources for Kikamba including multilingual machine translation, a morphology analyzer, a computational grammar which provides a platform for development of multilingual applications and the ability to generate a variety of bilingual corpora for Kikamba for all languages currently defined in GF, making it easier to experiment with data driven approaches.