Manual Annotation of Amharic News Items with Part-of-Speech Tags and its Challenges (Girma A. Demeke & Mesfin Getachew)

Since September 2005, the Ethiopian Languages Research Center of Addis Ababa University has been engaged in a project called "The Annotation of Amharic News Documents". The project was meant to tag manually each Amharic word in its context with the most appropriate parts-of-speech. This paper presents the POS tagset developed for annotating the news documents, the problems encountered in the process of tagging the news documents and the procedures followed to manually tag them. The major output of the work contains 1065 Amharic news documents (that constitute 210,000 prosodic words) annotated manually with part-of-speeches and a new tagset for the language derived from the 1065 news item. The outcome of the POS tagging project is assumed to have great contribution for future works in natural language processing of Amharic, including the development of probabilistic part-of-speech taggers (a software which uses a lexicon as a component for automatically assigning words with appropriate part-of-speech and a central component for higher level NLP tools such as parsers), a noun-phrase chunker (a software tool that seeks to identify noun phrases in a text) and for works in speech synthesis, speech recognition, information retrieval, word sense disambiguation, corpus analysis and computational lexicography of Amharic.

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