Basics for a grammar engine to verbalize logical theories in isiZulu

摘要

The language isiZulu is the largest in South Africa by numbers of first language speakers, yet, it is still an underresourced language. In this paper, we approach the grammar piecemeal from a natural language generation approach, and viewed from a potential utility for verbalizing OWL ontologies as a tangible use case. The elaborate rules of the grammar show that a grammar engine and dictionary is essential even for basic verbalizations in OWL 2 EL. This is due to, mainly, the 17 noun classes with embedded semantics and the agglutinative nature of isiZulu. The verbalization of basic constructs requires merging a prefix with a noun and distinguishing an `and' between a list and linking clauses.