In this paper we present experiments with data-driven part-of-speech taggers trained and evaluated on the annotated Helsinki Corpus of Swahili. Using four of the current state-of-the-art data-driven taggers, TnT, MBT, SVMTool and MXPOST, we observe the latter as being the most accurate tagger for the Kiswahili dataset.We further improve on the performance of the individual taggers by combining ...

Runyankore is one of the top five languages spoken in Uganda. It is a Bantu language, thus it possesses the characteristic agglutinative structure, which is known to be challenging for the development of computational resources. It is also computationally under-resourced, which compounds the problem further. Given the recent progress in the verbalization (the process of writing the semantics ex...

Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agric...

1. In groups of South African Bantu and Caucasian women aged 3 M years, sub-divided into those having had (i) none to two or (ii) seven or more children, measurements of radiographs of the second metacarpal and of the humerus were made in respect of length, cortical thickness, cortical index, cortical area/total area, cross-sectional area index and cortical/surface area ratio. 2. In Bantu mothe...

Numerous populations spread out across Central Africa were named Pygmies by Western explorers, since the 19th century, in reference to the mythical Pygmy population from Homer (“A people of short stature at war with migrating birds,” Iliad, song 3, v. 1 6). For more than 40 years, Pygmy populations have attracted the interest of biological anthropologists because they are seen as a lively examp...

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of “zeroing out” a tone in the above sense: When is an opposition properly analyzed as the presence vs. absence of a tone, rather than two different indications of tone, e.g. a + vs. of a tone feature?1 Although phonetic pitch (Fo) is scalar in nature, phonological (categorical) tone frequently has a privative character. The most frequent situat...