Yorùbá Noun Ontology from Functional Perspectives

Authors

  • Akindele A. Aina Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages,
  • Oyè Táíwò Department of Linguistics and African Languages,

Keywords:

Yorùbá noun, Ontological Annotation, Awobuluyi functional perspectives

Abstract

The present shift in language analysis from theoretical and descriptive analysis to applied, adaptable and implementation design has being the practice resulting from modern Information and Communication Technology world. It is noteworthy that Awobuluyi as a renowned Yorùbá scholar have always maintained the positon that a good grammar of any language should be from functional perspectives. Eventually, Ontological annotation as a modern practice by which theoretical knowledge occurring in its implicit form is prepared in both human and machine readable format to aid Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an edge in development. However, the fact that Yorùbá Scholars have considered other perspectives to identify and classify Yorùbá Noun make the knowledge heterogeneous and a big challenge for machine accessibility. This study in order to meet this challenge, extracts the implicit knowledge of Yorùbá nouns being described from Awobuluyi’s functional perspectives, to implements an ontology annotation model named Yorùbá Noun Ontology according to Awobuluyi (YORNOA), in an explicit, formal and machine readable format which make the knowledge available for NLP. The data for this study is the classification of Yorùbá noun as contained in Awobuluyi (1978)’s Essentials of Yorùbá Grammar and Awobuluyi (2013)’s È̩ kò̩ Gírámà Yorùbá. An additional 106 Nouns were purposively selected from Modern Yorùbá Dictionary to complement the twenty three (23) concept term extracted from the original text. Methontology as proposed by Gómez- Pérez, Fernandez-Lopez, and Corcho (2004) was followed to design the annotation, and Protégé 4.5 was used to implement the model. From the implementation thirteen (13) subclasses were specified of which two (2) are contrastive, the rest were non-contrastive because the (+) value that is returned for Human nouns cannot be returned for Non- Human nouns, (-) value was returned. This study demonstrate and concludes that the knowledge issues proposed from Awobuluyi functional perspectives can be extracted and presented in the format to shore up knowledge representation for NLP activities.

Author Biographies

Akindele A. Aina, Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages,

 

Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State. Nigeria.

 

Oyè Táíwò, Department of Linguistics and African Languages,

University of Ibadan, Ibadan

 

References

Abraham, R.C. (1965). Modern Yorùbá Dictionary. Oxford University Press. London.

Adegbola, T. (2006), Globalization: Colonizing the Space Flows?. Globalization and the Future of African Languages. Egbokhare and Kolawole. Ibadan Cultural Studies Group,Ibadan..2 – 11.

--------------- (2008), Indigenizing Human Language Technology for National Development. A Lecture delivered as First ARCIS Distinguished Guest Lecture, U.S.A.

---------------(2009), Building Capacities in Human Language Technology for African Languages. EACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technologies for African Languages – AFLaT. 53–58. Athens: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Adekoya, F.A. (2010), An evaluation framework for benchmarking the internal graph structure of Ontology. PhD.Thesis. Dept. of Computer Science. Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta,

Ogun State, Nigeria. xvi+171pp.

Aina, A. A. (2017), Modernization and Globalization of Yorùbá Language through Ontology Development- A Preliminary Investigation in Current Studies in Yorùbá Culture, Language and Literature A Festschrift for Olugboyega Alaba. 816-834

Andre, E and Rist, T. (1993), The design of illustrated documents as a Planning Task in M. T. Maybury ed., ‘Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces’, AAAI Press, The MIT Press, Menlo Park (CA) Cambridge London (England), pp. 94-116.

Awobuluyi, O. (1978). Essentials of Yorùbá Grammar: Ibadan: UPL.

Awobuluyi, O. 2008. Èkò̩ Ìs̩̀ è̩ dá Ò̩ rò̩ Yorùbá. Akure: Montem Paperbacks.

Awobuluyi, O. 2011. Linguistics and Nation Building. Ibadan.

Awobuluyi, O. (2013). È̩ kò̩ Gírámà Yorùbá: Òs̩̀ ogbo: ATMAN Limited.

Bamgbose A. (1965). A Grammar of Yorùbá: Cambridge University Press

Bamgbose A. (1990). Fonoloji ati Girama Yorùbá: Ibadan: UPL.

Corcho O. and A. Gómez-Pérez (2001), "Solving Integration Problems of E-Commerce Standards and

Initiatives through Ontological Mappings", In Proceedings of IJCAI 2001 Workshop on EBusiness & the Intelligent Web, Seattle, USA

Eludiora, S.I. (2012). Development of an English to Yorùbá machine translation. PhD Thesis Dept.

of Computer Science and Engineering. O.A.U. Ife.xi+206pp.

Emuoyibofarhe, N., Adebayo, S., Lala, G.O., and Aremu, R.O., (2015), A Yorùbá Cultural Tradition Repository Knowledge Based System. International Journal of Emerging Trends in Science and

Technology Vol. 2 issues 7: 2830-2841

Gómez-Pérez, A., Fernández-López, M., Corcho, O. (2004) Ontological Engineering: With Examples

from the Areas of Knowledge Management, E-Commerce and the Semantic Web. London: Springer-Verlag.

Guarino, N., Oberle, D. and Staab, S. (2009). ‘What is an Ontology? Formal Ontology in Information

Systems’. Proceedings of FOIS 1998. Trento Italy.

Gruber, T. R. 1993. A Translation Approach to portable Ontology specification. Knowledge Acquisition 5.2: 199-220.

Grüninger, M., Fox M.S. (1995). Methodology for the design and evaluation of ontologies. IJCAI’95

Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing, Montreal, Canada

Hassan, H., (2009). A Lexical Syntax for Statistical Machine Translation. PhD Thesis. School of Computing, Dublin City University. xvi+218pp. http://doras.dcu.ie/2320/1/Hany -Final-Thesis.pdf.

Retrieved on 04/05/2013.

Hassan, J.A., Odejobi, O.A., Ogunfolakan, B.A. and Adejuwon, A, (2013). Ontology Engineering in Yorùbá cultural Heritage Domain. African Journal of Comp. & ICTs IEEE. 6.5:181-198. Retrieved online Oct. 20, 2015 from http/www.ajocict.

Iyanda, A. R. 2014. Design and Implementation of a Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion System for

Yorùbá Text-to-Speech Synthesis. PhD Thesis. Dept. of Computer science. Obafemi Awolowo University. Ile Ife, Osun State, Nigeria. X+186pp.

Johnson, S (1921), The History of Yorùbás. Great Britain: Love & Brydone Printers Limited, Thetford Norfolk.

Lawson, T. (2004), A Conception of Ontology. mineo: Cambridge.

McEnery, A. M. and Wilson, A. (2001). Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh:

Noy, F. I. & D. L.McGuiness, 2000. Ontology Development 101: A guide to Creating your First Ontology. Standard Knowledge System Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05 and Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SM1 – 2001 – 0880.

Odoje, C. O. (2010), English-Yorùbá Rule Based Syntax in Machine Translation. M. A. Project, Department of Linguistics and African Languages. The University of Ibadan, Ibadan.

Odoje, C. O. (2017), Statistical machine translation. PhD. Thesis. Dept. of Linguistics and Africa Languages. University of Ibadan. xvi+218pp.

Owolabi, K. (1976). Noun-Noun Constructions in Yorùbá: A syntactic and Semantic Analysis. Ph.D Thesis. Dept. of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan.

Pareja-Lora (2012), ONTOTAG- A linguistic and ontological Model Suitable for the Semantic Web. A PhD Dissertation, Facultad De Informatica, Universidad Politecnica De Madrid

Taiwo, O. (2006a), Mofoloji. Ibadan: Layof Ventures Publishing Educational Service.

Taiwo, O. (2006b), The Indivisibility of {ai} in Standard Yorùbá. The Nigerian Linguists Festschrift Series 6:557-563.

Uschold, M. and Gruninger M. 1996. Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Application. Knowledge Engineering Review 11.2:105-129.

Uschold, M., King, M. (1995). Towards a Methodology for Building Ontologies. IJCAI’95Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing.,Ed. D. Skuce 6.1-6.10.

Zauzich, K. T. (1992), Hieroglyphs without mystery: an introduction to ancient Egyptian writing. Japan: University of Texas Press.

Downloads

Published

2019-01-01

How to Cite

A. Aina, A. ., & Táíwò, O. . (2019). Yorùbá Noun Ontology from Functional Perspectives. Journal of The Linguistic Association of Nigeria, 22(1), 169–211. Retrieved from https://jolan.com.ng/index.php/home/article/view/221