SETSWANA PART OF SPEECH TAGGING

Part of speech tagging is one of the basic steps in natural language processing. Although it has been investigated for many languages around the world, very little has been done for Setswana language. Setswana language is written disjunctively and some words play multiple functions in a sentence. These features make part of speech tagging more challenging. This paper presents a finite state method for identifying one of the compound parts of speech, the relative. Results show an 82% identification rate which is lower than for other languages. The results also show that the model can identify the start of a relative 97% of the time but fail to identify where it stops 13% of the time. The model fails due to the limitations of the morphological analyser and due to more complex sentences not accounted for in the model.