On the verbalization patterns of part-whole relations in isiZulu

Résumé

In the highly multilingual setting in South Africa, developing computational tools to support the 11 official languages will facilitate effective communication. The exigency to develop these tools for healthcare applications and doctor-patient interaction is there. An important component in this set-up is generating sentences in the language isiZulu, which involves part-whole relations to communicate, for instance, which part of one's body hurts. From a NLG viewpoint, the main challenge is the fluid use of terminology and the consequent complex agreement system inherent in the language, which is further complicated by phonological conditioning in the linguistic realisation stage. Through using a combined approach of examples and various literature, we devised verbalisation patterns for both meronymic and mereological relations, being structural/general parthood, involvement, containment, membership, subquantities, participation, and constitution. All patterns were then converted into algorithms and have been implemented as a proof-of-concept.

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