Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha

Natural Language Processing Tools: Developing a Part-of-speech Tagger and Partial Dependency Parser for Irish Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha

In the modern communication age, the use of technology is pervasive in almost all aspects of life. The use of computers, mobile phones, the Internet, and electronic games is increasing all the time, and all of these technologies employ natural language interfaces. Applications such as spellchecking, grammar checking, predictive texting, automatic call answering, speech synthesis, etc., each have language specific elements which are based on fundamental building blocks. This book presents a detailed picture of the development of such fundamental language resources. It describes the development of a tokenizer, a morphological analyser, a part-of-speech tagger, a partial dependency tagger, and a chunker for Irish. It introduces corpus creation, finite-state morphology, rule-based POS tagging and dependency parsing, together with standard methods of evaluation, and full code listings. This makes it an invaluable guide to those interested in Natural Language Processing, especially those developing NLP tools for a language with few pre-existing language resources.