Author:Heeringa, W; De Wet, Febe; Van Huyssteen, GBDate:Jul 2015Following Den Besten’s (2009) desiderata for historical linguistics of Afrikaans, this article aims to contribute some modern evidence to the debate regarding the founding dialects of Afrikaans. From an applied perspective (i.e. human language ...Read more
Author:Barnard, E; Gouws, E; Wolvaardt, K; Kleynhans, NDate:Nov 2004A number of issues realted to the development of speech-recognition systems with Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are discussed. A set of systematic experiments using the HTK toolkit and the TMIT database are used to elucidate matters such as the ...Read more
Author:Van Heerden, C; Barnard, E; Davel, MDate:Sep 2009Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) have great potential for information access in the developing world. However, the realisation of that potential requires the solution of several challenging problems, including the development of sufficiently ...Read more
Author:Davel, M; Barnard, EDate:Jul 2006Bootstrapping techniques can accelerate the development of language technology for resource-scarce languages. We (the authors) define a framework for the analysis of a general bootstrapping process whereby a model is improved through a ...Read more
Author:Davel, M; Barnard, EDate:27 Feb 2006Bootstrapping techniques can accelerate the development of language technology for new languages. The authors define a framework for the analysis of a general bootstrapping process whereby a model is improved through a controlled series of ...Read more
Author:Butgereit, LL; Botha, AdèleDate:May 2009With the push to better school results in mathematics, science, and technology related subjects, often language education is moved into the background. In Africa, however, education is often not in the mother tongue of the learners. Pupils ...Read more
Author:Grover, AS; Van Huyssteen, GB; Pretorius, MWDate:May 2010Human Language technologies (HLT) have been identified as a priority area by South African government to enable its eleven official languages technologically. We present the results of a technology audit for the South African HLT landscape, ...Read more
Author:Van Heerden, C; Schalkwyk, J; Strope, BDate:Sep 2009This paper describes the language modelling (LM) architectures and recognition experiments that enabled support of 'what-with-where' queries on GOOG-411. First the paper compares accuracy trade-offs between a single national business LM for ...Read more
Author:Van Huyssteen, GB; Davel, MHDate:Jun 2010In this research, the authors use machine learning techniques to provide solutions for descriptive linguists in the domain of language standardization. With regard to the personal name construction in Afrikaans, the authors perform function ...Read more
Author:Zerbian, S; Barnard, EDate:2008Much is already known about the prosodic systems of the indigenous South African languages from descriptions and analyses in the existing literature. All of the existing work has been carried out in the field of African studies or formal ...Read more
Author:Grover, AS; Van Huyssteen, GB; Pretorius, MWDate:May 2010Human language technologies (HLT) can play a vital role in bridging the digital divide and thus the HLT field has been recognised as a priority area by the South African government. The authors present the work on conducting a technology audit ...Read more
Author:Barnard, E; Wissing, DDate:2008For the development of Human Language Technologies such as automatic speech recognition systems or text-to-speech systems, exact acoustic and phonological information of the language in question is essential. In the case of Southern Sotho, ...Read more