Finite-state computational morphology - treatment of the Zulu noun

Morphological analysis is a basic enabling application for further kinds of natural language processing, including part-of-speech tagging, parsing, translation and other high-level applications. Automated morphological analyzers exist for many of the European languages, but have not been reported for any of the indigenous languages of southern Africa. Our project in computational morphological analysis/generation includes the production of an automated morphological analyzer/generator for Zulu, using finite-state methods and tools. In this paper we elaborate on the use of finite-state methods in computational morphology, and report on our treatment of the Zulu noun.