Rule Based Parts of Speech Tagging of Yorùbá Simple Sentences

This paper seeks to computationally advance the Yoruba language by designing its rule based tagger. The work adopts Standard Theory and Principles and Parameters Theory to segment and instruct the computer system of the syntactic structure of the language through Prolog. Some hundred Yoruba words are coded to serve as lexicon or dictionary.

Through the words, some syntactic rules are as well programmed. The work tags Yoruba parts of speech of non-derivative sentences. It reveals that not all Yoruba NPs can complement prepositions in prepositional phrases (PPs). It is however made known that there is need to reclassify Yoruba words so as to enable machines like computers to generate grammatically acceptable Yoruba sentences.