Linguistically annotated dataset for four official South African languages with a conjunctive orthography: IsiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Siswati

Abstract

This data article presents a linguistically annotated data set for four official South African languages with a conjunctive orthography, namely isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu and Siswati. The data set is parallel for all four languages and can be used for language-specific as well as cross-language development and evaluation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) core technologies. In addition, it can be used for corpus linguistic studies. The article describes how the data was collected, what type of texts it contains and it provides some details on the three different types of linguistic annotation added (morphology, part-of-speech and lemmas), including an example.

Keywords

• Natural language processing
• Human language technology
• Linguistic annotation
• Nguni languages