Ry/Rk-Lex: A Computational Lexicon for Runyankore and Rukiga Languages

Abstract

Current research in computational linguistics and NLP requires the existence of language resources. Whereas these resources are available for only a few well-resourced languages, there are many languages that have been neglected. Among the neglected and / or under-resourced languages are Runyankore and Rukiga (henceforth referred to as Ry/Rk). In this paper, we report on Ry/Rk-Lex, a moderately large computational lexicon for Ry/Rk that we constructed from various existing data sources. Ry/Rk are two under-resourced Bantu languages with virtually no computational resources. About 9,400 lemmata have been entered so far. Ry/Rk-Lex has been enriched with syntactic and lexical semantic features, with the intent of providing a reference computational lexicon for Ry/Rk in other NLP (1) tasks such as: morphological analysis and generation; part of speech (POS) tagging; named entity recognition (NER); and (2) applications such as: spell and grammar checking; and cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR).We have used Ry/Rk-Lex to dramatically increase the lexical coverage of previously developed computational resource grammars for Ry/Rk.