Nominal Class Assignment in Swahili: A Computational Account
This addresses a linguistic problem for researchers in computational linguistics and Bantu languages, offering incremental insights into Swahili nominal classes.
The paper tackled the problem of quantifying and explicating the relation between semantics and nominal class assignment in Swahili, providing the first quantitative evaluation of semantic cohesion and a nuanced taxonomic description for each class.
We discuss the open question of the relation between semantics and nominal class assignment in Swahili. We approach the problem from a computational perspective, aiming first to quantify the extent of this relation, and then to explicate its nature, taking extra care to suppress morphosyntactic confounds. Our results are the first of their kind, providing a quantitative evaluation of the semantic cohesion of each nominal class, as well as a nuanced taxonomic description of its semantic content.