Search

Many languages in Africa are written using Latin-based scripts, but often with extra diacritics (e.g. dots below in Igbo: $${\d i}, {\d o}, {\d u}$$) or modifications to the letters themselves (e.g. open vowels 'e' and 'o' in Lingala: ɛ, ɔ). While it is possible to render these characters accurately in Unicode, oftentimes keyboard input methods are not easily accessible or are cumbersome to use, and so the vast majority of electronic texts in many African languages are written in plain ASCII. We call the process of converting an ASCII text to its proper Unicode form unicodification. This paper describes an open-source package which performs automatic unicodification, implementing a variant of an algorithm described in previous work of De Pauw, Wagacha, and de Schryver. We have trained models for more than 100 languages using web data, and have evaluated each language using a range of feature sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All recorded African languages that have a writing system have orthographies which use the Roman or Arabic scripts, with a few exceptions. While Unicode successfully handles the encoding of both these scripts, current software, in particular Web browsers, take little account of users wishing to operate in a minority script. Their use for displaying African languages has been limited by the availability of facilities and the desire to communicate with the ‘world’ through major languages such as English and French. There is a need for more use of the indigenous languages to strengthen their language communities and the use of the local scripts in enhancing the learning, teaching, and general use of their own languages by their speaking communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]