Notes on African linguistics

Notes on computational linguistics

What African Linguistics Can Contribute to Evolutionary Linguistics

Inspired by evolutionary biology, the term evolutionary linguistics has been used recently by linguists such as Croft (2008), McMahon & McMahon (2013), and myself (Mufwene 2013a, 2013b) to characterize the kind of research being done today on language evolution that focuses not only on the phylogenetic emergence of language but also, or alternatively, on language speciation and the emergence of...

Computational Linguistics Advanced Dynamic Programming in Computational Linguistics: Theory, Algorithms and Applications Tutorial notes

Dynamic Programming (DP) is an important class of algorithms widely used in many areas of speech and language processing. Recently there have been a series of work trying to formalize many instances of DP algorithms under algebraic and graph-theoretic frameworks. This tutorial surveys two such frameworks, namely semirings and directed hypergraphs, and draws connections between them. We formaliz...

Notes on Automatic Control in African Sugar Factories

A comparison between the plants of some vital South African industries such as Sugar Industry, the Iron and Steel Industry, the Chemical, Pulp and Paper Industries as well as Power Stations will single out the South African Sugar Factories for one very noticeable item: The absence of supervising and controlling instruments for the manufacturing process and for a number of ancillary processes.' ...

To appear in the Belgian Journal of Linguistics Some notes on quotation

This paper offers support for, and modification of, Recanati’s distinction between open and closed quotation. It also points out two unresolved issues associated with quotation: the problem of reference to meaning, and a new category, tentatively named “noncitational quotation”.