On the Computerization of African Languages

Abstract

In this article, a computer tool for processing African languages has been designed. It is intended to be a contribution to the automatic processing of African languages. The current study is focused on West African languages where five main languages from Niger, two from Mali and one from Burkina Faso are considered. After a brief review of African languages processing, we designed a tool which uses minimum resources and operates essentially on a dictionary and the characteristics of the language alphabet. The dictionary is represented using a trie data structure. For the sake of application, the designed tool operates as a spell checker. To detect and correct spelling errors, the edit distance and the specificities of the language are used. Although they do not have processing tools, it was shown that existing tools for computerized languages can be adapted to African languages efficiently. To extend the designed tool to any African language, we only need to provide an appropriate dictionary and alphabet.