Nominal Class Assignment in Swahili: A Computational Account

TL;DR

This paper investigates the relationship between semantics and nominal class assignment in Swahili using a computational approach, providing the first quantitative and taxonomic analysis of semantic cohesion within classes.

Contribution

It offers a novel computational analysis quantifying semantic cohesion and describing the semantic content of Swahili nominal classes, addressing an open linguistic question.

Findings

Quantitative evaluation of semantic cohesion in nominal classes

Taxonomic description of semantic content per class

First computational approach to this linguistic problem

Abstract

We discuss the open question of the relation between semantics and nominal class assignment in Swahili. We approach the problem from a computational perspective, aiming first to quantify the extent of this relation, and then to explicate its nature, taking extra care to suppress morphosyntactic confounds. Our results are the first of their kind, providing a quantitative evaluation of the semantic cohesion of each nominal class, as well as a nuanced taxonomic description of its semantic content.