Morphological analysis of Gikuyu using a finite state machine

Abstract

In this paper we present the development of a morphological analysis system for Gikuyu Major morphological processes prevalent in Gikuyu language are explored. These include verb inflection, verb and noun derivation and verb reduplication. In this work, finite state transducers are used to model Gikuyu morphology. Xerox finite state tools are used to build the lexical transducers for the system and to model rewrite rules prevalent in Gikuyu. The system achieves an acceptable representation of Gikuyu morphology. It can correctly analyze Gikuyu words with an accuracy of 56%. As Gikuyu is highly inflections, ambiguity is a big challenge both in morphological analysis and machine translation