Another longstanding project (10+ years) in the forefront of Swahili language use on the internet is the Kamusi Project - Living Swahili Dictionary at http://www.yale.edu/swahili/ (see also mention of its forum for discussing Swahili in /m1).

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

Edited by author 09-18-2006 12:30 PM
Here is one message with information about Swahili that I received recently from Timo Honkela in response to a general question about MT in African lanuages:

Professor Arvi Hurskainen at University of Helsinki has conducted a lot of research on language technology for Bantu languages and especially Swahili. Here are some links related to that research:

- Helsinki Corpus of Swahili:
  http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/cameel/corpus/intro.htm

- SALAMA - Swahili Language Manager
  http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/salama/
  (includes a project on Swahili-to-English Machine Translation)

- PhD thesis by Wanjiku Ng'ang'a:
  Word Sense Disambiguation of Swahili
  http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/aasia/vk/nganga/

The SALAMA project has been underway now for over 20 years.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

Edited by author 09-18-2006 02:40 PM
Swahili (or KiSwahili as it is known in Swahili) is the most widely spoken African language, as a first or additional language. As a consequence it is receiving some of the most attention with relation to use in information and communication technologies (ICTs).

This message board is set up to facilitate communication about various technical initiatives, projects, and research. For the moment it will serve as an experiment to see if this format can serve as an easily accessible place for exchange of information on and links to research and projects for advanced computer applications in Swahili. These include:

• Online dictionaries like Kamusi
• Machine translation (MT) - computer programs for automatic translation into and out of Swahili
• Translation memory - computer programs that assist translators but are not the same as MT
• Geographic information systems (GIS)
• Text-to-speech (TTS) programs
• Speech recognition / speech-to-text (STT) programs
• Various WWW, "Web 2.0" & "semantic web" applications
• Programming in Swahili
• Other cutting edge ICTs

Part of the reason for setting this up is that I receive some information about Swahili language activities that is interesting and useful but does not always fit the format of other webpages such as those on Bisharat.net or the new PanAfrican Localisation (PAL) project site.

This forum is not intended to replace existing forums for discussion of Swahili language such as

• H-Swahili http://www.h-net.org/~swahili/
• Kamusi Project Swahili Online Forum http://research.yale.edu/swahili/learn/?q=forum
• Kiswahili http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kiswahili/

Those interested in learning Swahili or disussing Swahili topics are suggested to use those lists.

Hopefully this message board - the latest in a group of others accessible via http://www.quicktopic.com/share?s=QSpo - will turn out to be useful and contribute in some way to advance computing in Swahili and other African languages.

Don

Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo@bisharat.net
*Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative
*Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement
http://www.bisharat.net

*PanAfrican Localisation Project
*Projet panafricain sur la localisation
http://www.PanAfriL10n.org (new site coming)