Farayi/ShonaHLT

Development of Human Language Technology Tools for Shona # ShonaHLT Development of Human Language Technology Tools for Shona This is now part of my M.Phil Research project. Shona is the first language of the majority of Zimbabweans. Depending on which dialects you include, it has between 8.6 and 15 million native speakers. It's grammar has been studied and documented for close to a hundred years, yet in this world of technological advances, it remains largely rooted in the pre-computing age. There are very few Human Language technology resources available for it. In this project I am evaluating computational language models of the Southern Bantu language group, which includes Shona, because I want to find out the factors that influence their effectiveness for supporting context sensitive spelling and grammar checking, so that computer scientists can develop more useful context sensitive spelling and grammar checkers and correctors for these languages.