Abstract

Morphological analysis is one of the first steps in natural language studies. It is a basic component in a number of natural language processing systems. There are a few attempts made with regard to the development of Setswana morphology analyzer and generator. However, these attempts are not fully developed to produce a potential multipurpose Setswana morphological analyzer and generator. This paper presents a rule-based Setswana verb morphological analysis and generation. Morphological rules are supported by a dictionary of root words. Results show that Setswana verbs could mostly be analyzed using morphological rules and the rules could also be used to generate words. The analyzer gives 87% performance rate. The rules fail when multiple words have the same intermediate word and homographs. The generator shows that Setswana verbs are very productive with an average of 89 words per root word. However, ambiguity in word generation rules leads to formation of words that are meaningless or are not used.