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A Complete FS Model for Amharic Morphographemics

  • Conference paper
Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4002))

Abstract

Our aim was to develop a complete morphographemic model for Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, which urgently needs computational linguistic tools for information retrieval and natural language processing. Amharic is a Semitic language, with SOV word order and a complex morphology with consonantal roots and vowel intercalation, extensive agglutination, and both consonantal and vocalic stem modification. Previous computational models of Amharic lexemes are fragmentary, being restricted to affix stripping and radical extraction [2], [4], [3], [1]. The verb analysis by Fissaha and Haller [8] is the only previous FS based approach. FS and related approaches to other Semitic languages have also tended to concentrate on selected features of theoretical interest, such as the well–known analyses of Arabic intercalation [9], [5], [10].

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Amsalu, S., Gibbon, D. (2006). A Complete FS Model for Amharic Morphographemics. In: Yli-Jyrä, A., Karttunen, L., Karhumäki, J. (eds) Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing. FSMNLP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4002. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11780885_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11780885_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35467-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35469-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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