MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYZER AND GENERATOR FOR KAMBAATISSA USING FINITE STATE TRANSDUCER

Abstract

Kambaatissa is a Highland East Cushitic Language spoken in the Kambaata Xambaaro zone of South Nation Nationality and People Regional State, Ethiopia. It is a strictly suffixing and morphologically rich language. The language is one of the under-resourced languages in Ethiopia. For languages with complex morphology, nearly all computational work depends on the presence of tools for morphological processing. Many researches have been conducted in morphological analysis extensively for different languages, while this work is the first work in Kambaatissa natural language processing applications. This study focused on a morphological analyzer and generator, which is a lower-level natural language processing application that is used as a base for many higher NLP applications. A finite state transducer is a framework for modeling morphology. In this study, Foma is used as an implementation toolkit and lexc formalism for designing the lexicon. The experiment is done using 860 root verbs. There are seventeen continuous classes and forty different rules in the lexicon and foma file respectively. Result from the experiment shows that 92,020 words are generated among them the transducer gives 95.2% correct Kambaatissa verbs.