There are many domain-specific and language-specific NLG systems, which are possibly adaptable across related domains and languages. The languages in the Bantu language family have their own set of features distinct from other major groups, which therefore severely limits the options to bootstrap an NLG system from existing ones. We present here our first proof-of-concept application for knowle...

In this paper I examine how quantification is expressed in Logoori, a Luyia (Bantu) language spoken in western Kenya. I focus on the two universal quantifiers in Logoori, viz., vuri ‘every’ and -oosi ‘all’. I show that these two quantifiers display a number of syntactic and semantic differences and present a compositional analysis to account for those differences. Throughout, I discuss how the ...

The paper describes a collaboration approach in progress for morphological analysis of less-resourced languages. The approach is based on firstly, a language-independent machine learning algorithm, Maximum Affix Overlap, that generates candidates for morphological decompositions from an initial set of language-specific training data; and secondly, language-dependent post-processing using langua...

This paper derives from work we have been doing on unsupervised learning of the morphology of languages with rich morphologies, that is, with a high average number of morphemes per word. Our focus in this paper is Swahili, a major Bantu language of East Africa, and our goal is the development of a system that can automatically produce a morphological analyzer of a text on the basis of a large c...

The issue of Bantu vowel height harmony is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another. As is quite well-known, the majority of an estimated 500± Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. In this paper I have three goals. First, I present a comprehensive treat...

The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon a...

Technological and cultural innovations as well as climate changes are thought to have influenced the diffusion of major language phyla in sub-Saharan Africa. The most widespread and the richest in diversity is the Niger-Congo phylum, thought to have originated in West Africa ∼ 10,000 years ago (ya). The expansion of Bantu languages (a family within the Niger-Congo phylum) ∼ 5,000 ya represents ...

Theorists of language acquisition have long debated the means by which children learn the argument structure of verbs (e.g. Bowerman, 1974, 1990; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Tomasello, 1992). Central to this controversy has been the possible role of verb semantics, especially in learning which verbs undergo dative-shift alternation in languages like English. The learning problem is somewhat simplified ...

Natural Language Generation (NLG) can be used to generate personalized health information, which is especially useful when provided in one’s own language. However, the NLG technique widely used in different domains and languages—templates—was shown to be inapplicable to Bantu languages, due to their characteristic agglutinative structure. We present here our use of the grammar engine NLG techni...

In this study I present a comparative and historical analysis of ‘‘frequentative’’ Bantu verb-stem reduplication, many of whose variants have been described for a number of Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. While some languages have full-stem compounding, where the stem consists of the verb root plus any and all suffixes, others restrict the reduplicant to two syllables. Two questions are a...