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].
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alemayehu, N., Willett, P.: Stemming of Amharic words for information retrieval. Literary and Linguistic computing 17(1), 1–17 (2002)
Atalech Alemu, L.A., Eriksson, G.: Building an Amharic lexicon from parallel texts. In: Proceedings of: First Steps for Language Documentation of Minority Languages: Computational Linguistic Tools for Morphology, Lexicon and Corpus Compilation, a workshop at LREC, Lisbon (2004)
Bayou, A.: Developing automatic word parser for Amharic verbs and their derivation. Master’s thesis, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa (2000)
Bayu, T.: Automatic morphological analyzer for Amharic: An experiment involving unsupervised learning and autosegmental analysis approaches. Master’s thesis, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa (2002)
Beesley, K., Karttunen, L.: Finite State Morphology. CSLI, Stanford (2003)
Bender, M.L., Fulas, H., Dawkins, C.H.: Amharic Verb Morphology. Michigan State University, African Studies Center, East Lansing (1978)
Dawkins, C.H.: The Fundamentals of Amharic. Sudan Interior Mission, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1960)
Fissaha, S., Haller, J.: Amharic verb lexicon in the context of machine translation. In: TALN (2003)
Kay, M.: Nonconcatenative finite–state morphology. In: EACL Proceedings, pp. 2–10 (1987)
Reinhard, S., Gibbon, D.: Prosodic inheritance and morphological generalisations. In: Proceedings of EACL (1991)
Yimam, B.: Root reductions and extensions in Amharic. Ethiopian Journal of Languages and Literature 9, 56–88 (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
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)