Implementing an open source amharic resource grammar in GF

Abstract

Developing language applications or localization of software is a resource intensive task that requires the active participation of stakeholders with various backgrounds. With a constant increase in the amounts of electronic information and the diversity of languages which are used to produce them, these challenges get compounded. Various researches in the fields of computational linguistics and computer science have been carried out while still many more are on their way to alleviate such problems. Grammatical Framework (GF) is one potential candidate to this. GF is a grammar formalism designed for multilingual grammars. A multilingual grammar has a shared representation, called abstract syntax, and a set of concrete syntaxes that map the abstract syntax to different languages. In this thesis, we describe an implementation of Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia, as a resource grammar in GF and we deal with orthography, morphology and syntax of the language. The work contributes to the reduction of the amount of time and energy spent while developing language-related applications using Amharic. This report is written in English.