Thesis (M.A. (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2010 / This study is a comparative analysis of two English monolingual dictionaries and two Northern Sotho – English bilingual dictionaries, namely Concise Oxford English Dictionary(2006), Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2006), Pharos Popular Northern Sotho Dictionary (1995) and Sesotho Sa Leboa – English Pukuntšu Dictionary (2006). The above four dictionaries are compared in terms of cross – referencing, pronunciation and parts of speech. The microstructure of certain dictionaries does not address most problems that dictionary users have. It is in the microstructure, where dictionary users learn that certain lemmata are synonymous, polysemous in sense, antonyms or that a lemma has two alternative spellings, and that both spelling are acceptable. This is done through cross –referencing. Dictionary users need to be guided on how lemmata are pronounced, otherwise the meaning of lemmata become distorted. The other problem which the microstructure has to deal with, is to indicate the type of parts of speech lemmata are. This research is an attempt to make lexicographers aware of the importance of including the above aspects in the microstructure of their dictionaries.

Thesis (M.A. (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2013 / This study entails the translation of scientific terms from English into Northern Sotho. The reason one conducted this study is because translators experience difficulties in finding the correct equivalent terms, especially in Northern Sotho. Consequently, borrowing and transliteration of terms becomes their last resort. However, that does not help users of dictionaries to achieve their communicative goal. The study highlights that, the borrowing of terms leads to language shift and death as users no longer consider other equivalents. In addition, the study indicates that the constant usage of the borrowed terms causes the terms to lose meaning and function. The way in which people translate idiomatic expressions is a huge problem as well. Mostly, people end up using literal translation and subsequently, the whole meaning of a text is lost or misunderstood.

Thesis (MA. (Translation Studies and Linguistics)) -- University of Limpopo, 2012 / Structural markers, front matter, contextual guidance and cross-referencing are some of the important features of bilingual dictionaries which are often taken for granted. This study evaluates the presentation of structural markers in some Northern Sotho/English Bilingual dictionaries, with special reference to Pharos: Popular Northern Sotho Dictionary and Sesotho sa Leboa/English Pukuntšu Dictionary. The study further evaluates the use of the front matter, contextual guidance and cross-referencing in bilingual dictionaries. The study has established that bilingual dictionaries can become user-friendly if they identify and use appropriate strategies, as this leads to communicative success. By contrast, the incorrect application of a comma or a semicolon may lead to a misinterpretation of the supplied equivalents in bilingual dictionaries.

This dissertation reports on studies of the application of lexicographic graph searches to solve problems in FPGA detailed routing. Our contributions include the derivation of iteration limits for scalar implementations of negotiation congestion for standard floating point types and the identification of pathological cases for path choice. In the study of the routability-driven detailed FPGA routing problem, we show universal detailed routability is NP-complete based on a related proof by Lee and Wong. We describe the design of a lexicographic composition operator of totally-ordered monoids as path cost metrics and show its optimality under an adapted A* search. Our new router, CornNC, based on lexicographic composition of congestion and wirelength, established a new minimum track count for the FPGA Place and Route Challenge. For the problem of long-path timing-driven FPGA detailed routing, we show that long-path budgeted detailed routability is NP-complete by reduction to universal detailed routability. We generalise the lexicographic composition to any finite length and verify its optimality under A* search. The application of the timing budget solution of Ghiasi et al. is used to solve the long-path timing budget problem for FPGA connections. Our delay-clamped spiral lexicographic composition design, SpiralRoute, ensures connection based budgets are always met, thus achieves timing closure when it successfully routes. For 113 test routing instances derived from standard benchmarks, SpiralRoute found 13 routable instances with timing closure that were unroutable by a scalar negotiated congestion router and achieved timing closure in another 27 cases when the scalar router did not, at the expense of increased runtime. We also study techniques to improve SpiralRoute runtimes, including a data structure of a trie augmented by data stacks for minimum element retrieval, and the technique of step tomonoid elimination in reducing the retrieval depth in a trie of stacks structure.

<p>The focus of this thesis is on re-using translations in natural language processing. It involves the collection of documents and their translations in an appropriate format, the automatic extraction of translation data, and the application of the extracted data to different tasks in natural language processing.</p><p>Five parallel corpora containing more than 35 million words in 60 languages have been collected within co-operative projects. All corpora are sentence aligned and parts of them have been analyzed automatically and annotated with linguistic markup.</p><p>Lexical data are extracted from the corpora by means of word alignment. Two automatic word alignment systems have been developed, the Uppsala Word Aligner (UWA) and the Clue Aligner. UWA implements an iterative "knowledge-poor" word alignment approach using association measures and alignment heuristics. The Clue Aligner provides an innovative framework for the combination of statistical and linguistic resources in aligning single words and multi-word units. Both aligners have been applied to several corpora. Detailed evaluations of the alignment results have been carried out for three of them using fine-grained evaluation techniques.</p><p>A corpus processing toolbox, Uplug, has been developed. It includes the implementation of UWA and is freely available for research purposes. A new version, Uplug II, includes the Clue Aligner. It can be used via an experimental web interface (UplugWeb).</p><p>Lexical data extracted by the word aligners have been applied to different tasks in computational lexicography and machine translation. The use of word alignment in monolingual lexicography has been investigated in two studies. In a third study, the feasibility of using the extracted data in interactive machine translation has been demonstrated. Finally, extracted lexical data have been used for enhancing the lexical components of two machine translation systems.</p>

The focus of this thesis is on re-using translations in natural language processing. It involves the collection of documents and their translations in an appropriate format, the automatic extraction of translation data, and the application of the extracted data to different tasks in natural language processing. Five parallel corpora containing more than 35 million words in 60 languages have been collected within co-operative projects. All corpora are sentence aligned and parts of them have been analyzed automatically and annotated with linguistic markup. Lexical data are extracted from the corpora by means of word alignment. Two automatic word alignment systems have been developed, the Uppsala Word Aligner (UWA) and the Clue Aligner. UWA implements an iterative "knowledge-poor" word alignment approach using association measures and alignment heuristics. The Clue Aligner provides an innovative framework for the combination of statistical and linguistic resources in aligning single words and multi-word units. Both aligners have been applied to several corpora. Detailed evaluations of the alignment results have been carried out for three of them using fine-grained evaluation techniques. A corpus processing toolbox, Uplug, has been developed. It includes the implementation of UWA and is freely available for research purposes. A new version, Uplug II, includes the Clue Aligner. It can be used via an experimental web interface (UplugWeb). Lexical data extracted by the word aligners have been applied to different tasks in computational lexicography and machine translation. The use of word alignment in monolingual lexicography has been investigated in two studies. In a third study, the feasibility of using the extracted data in interactive machine translation has been demonstrated. Finally, extracted lexical data have been used for enhancing the lexical components of two machine translation systems.

A brief account of the work of the Strathy Language Unit (Queen's University)to produce a corpus suitable for supporting the publication of Guide to Canadian English Usage (Oxford 1997, 2nd ed. 2007)

Speakers of Persian, like speakers of other languages, utilise Routine Politeness Formulae (RPF) to negotiate central interpersonal interactions. RPF in Persian have not received any systematic description as to their forms, their functions, their typical conditions of use and their discourse structure rules. Bridging this gap, for the first time, RPF from five frequently-used speech acts – namely, greeting, leave-taking, apologizing, thanking and requesting – are documented in this thesis. Data were derived from Persian soap operas and from role-plays with native speakers, and were entered into a database for further analysis. The analysis is qualitative and the data are conceived of as phraseological units to be represented as dictionary entries. The study of the aforementioned speech acts and their related array of RPF reveals the dynamics of interpersonal polite behaviour among Persians, reflecting the following socio-cultural values prevalent in Iranian society: (i) its group-oriented nature, (ii) a tendency towards positive (solidarity) politeness, (iii) sensitivity to remaining in people’s debt, (iv) sensitivity to giving trouble to others, (v) a high premium on reciprocity in interpersonal communications, (vi) the importance of seniority in terms of age and social status, and (vii) differentiation between members of the ‘inner circle’ and the ‘outer circle’. This thesis also reveals the dominance of the strategy of self-lowering and other-elevating. Almost all RPF in Persian allow for the use of this pervasive strategy, which is also manifested by two further sub-strategies: (i) a propensity to exaggerate favours received from others, and (ii) giving precedence to others over oneself. Finally, it is suggested that Islamic teachings have significantly influenced the formation and use of certain RPF. The dictionary resulting from this work can serve as a resource for researchers in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, and for the teaching of Persian to non-Persian speakers.

Nama is a Khoekhoe-language variety spoken in more than three countries namely Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and Angola. The language was previously called the Nama language, however, for pragmatic reasons, to cater for a Damara/Nama union, it is called Khoekhoegowab in Namibia. As far as I know there has been no comprehensive study on Nama/Damara/Khoekhoegowab. A preliminary study was done by Haacke, Eiseb and Namaseb (1997). However, as can be seen from the title of this study, it was ‘preliminary’ which means the authors are the first to admit that their study was not complete. The aim of this thesis was to undertake an extensive linguistic analysis of Khoekhoegowab as a way to come up with a comprehensive dialectal inventory. The established dialectal inventory will not only help in the linguistic development of Khoekhoegowab, but also in the determination of a standard linguistic code, leading to iv development of materials. This is important in grammatical descriptions needed for literacy material development and language policy implementation. Following Haacke, Eiseb and Namaseb (1997) and Guldenmann (2000, 2003, 2008), the study employed a dialectal difference or comparative approach. Considering the nature of the study, a mixed research design was used to collect the data. The data was drawn from the few available studies on Nama/Damara or Khoekhoegowab dialects such as those by Haacke, Eiseb and Namaseb (1997) and Du Plessis (2009). This was supplemented and complemented by document analysis and the various Khoekhoegowab literature. Interviews of limited key informants and focus groups were undertaken in various regions namely (Hardap, Karas and Kunene). The narratives from these interviews were used to determine the dialects currently in place as well as the differences and similarities. The collected data was then treated to a linguistic and dialectal analysis (cf. Guldenmann 2000, 2003, 2008; Du Plessis, 2009) as a way to discover similarities and differences, which will in turn inform the proposal on a possible standard form and composite orthography. The phonological differences of the three dialects under discussion were identified where the vowel system was discussed. With regard to the plain vowels, an argument was made that the Central Nama and Central Damara are in fact similar in terms of vowel inventory compared to Central Nama and the Bondelswarts dialects. The phonetic aspects of the consonant system of the identified dialects were also discussed. A discussion on clicks and click consonants was also made where a distinction was drawn between plain clicks and complex clicks. The morphosyntax v of Khoehoegowab was also discussed where it was obvious that there were mainly more similarities than differences between the dialects. The phonetic inventories identified in chapters 4 and 5 were assessed using data from different sources such as the Bible, the Social Security booklet, the grade 9 school textbook, Facebook (a social media page), Google maps, Khoekhoegowab orthography (2003), and the Ministry of Health booklet. The aim of this was to account for differences and similarities between various materials in terms of symbols used for writing Khoekhoegowab. There were differences observed which were because of the influence of modern technology (especially the electronic keyboard) on the writing practices of Khoekhoegowab speakers. The proposed orthography takes technological developments into account. As a contribution, this study provides new insight into the issues of voicing, and voiced and voiceless consonants. In terms of theory the handling of tone and length was discussed in detail where it was established that tone is phonemic and not vowel length. The issue of whether or not complex clicks should be treated as units or clicks plus an accompaniment was discussed where I argued that the sounds are co-articulated and should be treated as one. Regarding the orthography, although there is orthography, the existing orthography is clearly not adequate as some of the sounds were not correctly captured. This has an implication on teaching the language in the schools. It will help in the revitalizing of Khoekhoegowab compared to more established Bantu languages. / Philosophiae Doctor - PhD

This dissertation reports on studies of the application of lexicographic graph searches to solve problems in FPGA detailed routing. Our contributions include the derivation of iteration limits for scalar implementations of negotiation congestion for standard floating point types and the identification of pathological cases for path choice. In the study of the routability-driven detailed FPGA routing problem, we show universal detailed routability is NP-complete based on a related proof by Lee and Wong. We describe the design of a lexicographic composition operator of totally-ordered monoids as path cost metrics and show its optimality under an adapted A* search. Our new router, CornNC, based on lexicographic composition of congestion and wirelength, established a new minimum track count for the FPGA Place and Route Challenge. For the problem of long-path timing-driven FPGA detailed routing, we show that long-path budgeted detailed routability is NP-complete by reduction to universal detailed routability. We generalise the lexicographic composition to any finite length and verify its optimality under A* search. The application of the timing budget solution of Ghiasi et al. is used to solve the long-path timing budget problem for FPGA connections. Our delay-clamped spiral lexicographic composition design, SpiralRoute, ensures connection based budgets are always met, thus achieves timing closure when it successfully routes. For 113 test routing instances derived from standard benchmarks, SpiralRoute found 13 routable instances with timing closure that were unroutable by a scalar negotiated congestion router and achieved timing closure in another 27 cases when the scalar router did not, at the expense of increased runtime. We also study techniques to improve SpiralRoute runtimes, including a data structure of a trie augmented by data stacks for minimum element retrieval, and the technique of step tomonoid elimination in reducing the retrieval depth in a trie of stacks structure.