DESIGN OF A MORPHOLOGICAL GENERATOR AND ANALYZER FOR SIDAAMU AFOO VERBS USING FINITE-STATE TRANSDUCER

Abstract

Sidaamu Afoo is an official language of the newly formed sidaama national state. It is one of the under-resourced languages of Ethiopia. There are very small attempts of study in the morphological perspective of the language. The morphological study is a low-level activity that paves the way for the development of high-level NLP applications. This study was interested in the design and implementation of a morphological generator and analyzer for the language verbs. The finite state transducer is used to design the verb morphological generator and analyzer system. Lexicon formalism is used for designing method and foma programming language as implementation toolkit. Forty-one distinct linguistic rules were used to form those variate word forms. The experimental result shows that out of 74,934 total generated words, 94.8% of words are correctly generated and analyzed by the system. Only 5.2% of words generated are invalid and wrongly analyzed. The factors of the problem are optional replacement rules and compiler ignorance of the glottal consonant of the language. Strict demarcation boundary for optional replacement rules and alternative techniques for glottal sound management left for future work.