Towards a Comprehensive, Machine-readable Dialectal Dictionary of Igbo

Abstract

Availability of electronic resources, textual or otherwise, is a first step towards language technology research and development. This paper describes the acquisition and processing of a multi-dialectal speech and text corpora for the Igbo language. The compiled corpus provides the key resource for the de nition of a machine-readable dialectal dictionary for Igbo. The work centres around an online portal that facilitates collaborative acquisition, de nition and editing of the dialectal dictionary. The complete dictionary, which includes features such as phonetic pronounciation, syllabi cation, synthesized pronounciation as well as GIS locations, is then made available via a website.