Pilon, Puttkammer & Van Huyssteen 2008

Pilon, Suléne, Martin J. Puttkammer, and Gerhard B. Van Huyssteen. 2008. “Die ontwikkeling van ‘n woordafbreker en kompositumanaliseerder vir Afrikaans [The development of a hyphenator and compound analyser for Afrikaans].” Literator 29 (1):21-41.

The development of two core-technologies for Afrikaans; viz. a hyphenator and a compound analyser is described in this article. As no annotated Afrikaans data existed prior to this project to serve as training data for a machine learning classifier; the core-technologies in question are first developed using a rule-based approach. The rule-based hyphenator and compound analyser are evaluated and the hyphenator obtains an f-score of 90,84%, while the compound analyser only reaches an f-score of 78,20%. Since these results are somewhat disappointing and/or insufficient for practical implementation, it was decided that a machine learning technique (memory-based learning) will be used instead. Training data for each of the two core-technologies is then developed using “TurboAnnotate”, an interface designed to improve the accuracy and speed of manual annotation. The hyphenator developed using machine learning has been trained with 39 943 words and reaches an f-score of 98,11% while the f-score of the compound analyser is 90,57% after being trained with 77 589 annotated words. It is concluded that machine learning (specifically memory-based learning) seems an appropriate approach for developing core-technologies for Afrikaans.

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Afrikaans keywords