Ethiopia Information Communication

Technology Annual Conference 2014

EICTAC 2014

CONFERENCE BOOKLET

JUNE 6,2014

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 Table of Content
Page
1. Message from the Conference Organization Committee…………………………………………..1

2. The Status and the way forward of ICT Curriculum in Ethiopia Secondary Schools……4

3. The Development of Amharic Morphological Analyzer Using Memory Based Learning.11

4. Amharic Anaphora Resolution Using Knowledge Poor Approach………………………………….18

5. Web Based Amharic Question Answering System for Factoid Questions Using Machine Learning

Approach ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..25

6. A Mathematical Algorithm for Robust Color Retinal Image Analysis a preliminary study

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………31

7. Automatic Recognition of Ethiopia License plates…………………………………………………………...38

8. Designing Amharic Definitive Question Answering ………………………………………………………. 44

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The Status and the way forward of ICT Curriculum in Ethiopian Secondary
Schools
Abebe Basazinew Bekele and Mulugeta Libsie
Department of Computer Science, College of Natural Sciences
Addis Ababa University
{abebeb2000, mlibsie}@yahoo.com
Abstract - This paper presents the result of a research
of ICT education in Ethiopian secondary schools, its status
of implementation and suggests the way forward for future
ICT education. The aim was to obtain an indication of the
drawbacks of ICT curriculum. The research, with a
convenience sample, was carried out using questionnaire,
Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and observation (using a
check list). The research revealed that ICT education in
Ethiopian secondary schools has serious problems such as
inappropriate contents, lack of resources and insufficient
teachers’ knowledge and skills. The research concluded
that the teachers in most secondary schools are not
qualified for the level. The study also revealed that schools
have no sufficient resources like hardware, software and
Internet connection to teach ICT. We also found that the
teaching/learning materials such as textbooks and teachers
guides were not developed in suitable way. This paper
outlines the problems of teaching ICT as a subject in
Ethiopian high schools and recommends actions for
improvement.
Keywords: ICT, ICT Education in Secondary Schools, ICT
Curriculum, ICT Teaching Resources, ICT teachers’ qualification.
I. INTRODUCTION
Information and Communications Technology (ICT)
is a broad term that is used to refer to the ways and
means by which information is processed and
communicated using automatic systems, such as
computers and other telecommunication and office
systems. ICT becomes a vital part of the operation of
most businesses and industries. The expanded use of
computers in the society has increased the number of
employment opportunity available to individuals with
some computer-related experience or training. In
addition, the increasing use of information technology in
the contemporary society proves that ICT is absolutely
necessary for development [1].
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) uses the term ICTs, or
information and communication technologies, to
describe: “…the tools and the processes to access,
retrieve, store, organize, manipulate, produce, present
and exchange information by electronic and other
automated means. These include hardware, software and
telecommunications in the forms of personal computers,
scanners, digital cameras, phones, faxes, modems, CD
and DVD players and recorders, digitized video, radio
and TV programmes, database programmes and
multimedia programmes” [2].
The world is dynamic and is changing fast. Some of
these changes are social and political, others are
ecological. Some are evolutionary, others revolutionary
[3]. No matter where we plan to live or what we plan to
do, we can expect that constant and rapid change will be
a normal part of life.
Technology, especially information and
communication technology, is playing a large part in
these changes. Advances in computer systems have
facilitated advances in entertainment, in medicine, in
military capacities, in the collection and dissemination
of global news reports, and in the management of
organizations. Continually evolving computer hardware
and software have allowed organizations to significantly
change their work process; new products and services
have been developed, new industries have emerged, and
old companies and industries have failed. Moreover, the
technologies continue to expand in their capabilities and
applications [1].
Increasingly in the modern world, acquisition of
computer skills is becoming necessary for employment,
educational development, and leisure. Computer studies
intend to furnish students with a broad knowledge of the
nature of information processing and how ICT is used
today [4]. Tomorrow‟s world is an ICT one where
information handling skills will be needed to improve
the standard of learning and living. The world is
becoming connected electronically by the Internet, the
world-wide network through which we can all share
information.
According to Sanders [5], to be an educated citizen
today, we must be acquainted not only with computers
themselves but also with what computers do, how they
are put to work, and how they affect individuals and
organizations in a society.
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 In the report titled “The National ICT for
Development (ICT4D) Five Years Action Plan for
Ethiopia”, Dzidonu [6] mentioned that Ethiopia,
recognizing the developmental potentials and
opportunities of the information and technological
revolution, has embarked on a process of economic
transformation through the modernization of the key
sectors of the economy including those of agriculture,
services and industrial sectors through the deployment
and the exploitation of ICTs. Acknowledging the key
role that development, deployment and exploitation of
ICTs can play in Ethiopia‟s economic and social
development, the Government recognizes the need for
the rapid development of the nation‟s information and
communications infrastructure as well as the
development of the nation‟s educational, human
resources and other development-focused resources to
bring about the necessary change and transformation
required to achieve improvements in the determinants of
the nation‟s socio-economic performance.
With the above national ICT strategy, the Ethiopian
ICT syllabi is geared towards students who are in
secondary school and is designed to equip them with
knowledge of computer skills, the applied use in the
world of work, and a background for further training. It
includes theoretical and practical content in hardware,
software, communication and data processing. The
Ethiopian curriculum of ICT has been in implementation
for about fourteen years but its status has not been yet
explored. Therefore, from this crucial perspective, this
research is conducted in Addis Ababa to identify the
major problems of implementation, solutions to the
problems, and compare the existing secondary school
ICT curriculum in relation to other countries‟ experience
and to suggest the way forward for secondary school
ICT curriculum of Ethiopia.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II briefly surveys literature and some of the important
works related to the work in this paper. Section III
outlines the research approach and the research
questions. Section IV presents the results of the study.
Finally, Section V concludes the paper by outlining
recommendations and future work.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
We live in a technological world where ICTs are
fundamental to most activities [10]. The importance of
ICT in society is emphasized in enabling our future
which identifies ICT literate citizens as being central to a
country‟s economic and social goals, to improving
productivity and efficiency, and to build innovative
capacity and competitiveness.
The ability of individuals to use ICT appropriately to
access, manage, evaluate information, develop new
understandings, and communicate with others is very
important in order to participate effectively in society.
These Statements of Learning and the professional
elaborations view ICT as an integral tool in the learning
process [10]. ICT has the potential to extend student
learning capabilities, engaging them in understanding
concepts and processes in areas of learning and
facilitating change in learning, thinking and teaching.
New technologies are introduced continually, and the
existing ones become obsolete almost as soon as they
appear [10]. The rapid evolution of the discipline has a
profound effect on ICT education, affecting both content
and pedagogy. The general aim of ICT education is to
introduce the necessary knowledge, skills, and culture to
use and work with information and knowledge for
citizens living in the knowledge based society.
ICT education can not cover all the rapid
developments in modern Computer Science. Therefore,
the goal is to emphasize on general education by
presenting fundamentals in Computer and Information
Science, providing students with the basic knowledge
and skills in exploring different fields of sciences, and
preparing them for their future life and role in the
knowledge based society.
The impact of educational level on economic
development is more pronounced with the recent growth
of ICT and its increasing importance in social and
economic development. This has profound implications
for education both in how ICTs can be used to
strengthen education, and how education can be more
effective in promoting the growth of ICT. However,
education systems have changed very little in response.
Without improved efficiencies in their education
systems, developing nations will not likely be able to
provide the additional human capital required to achieve
economic self-sufficiency in the context of a highly
competitive global economy that is increasingly based
on the electronic transfer and manipulation of
information [10].
Lim [15] showed that a socio-cultural approach
towards the study of ICT in schools rejects the view that
ICT can be studied in isolation, or as a single variable in
the learning environment holding all other things
constant. The research was carried out in two phases.
Phase one comprises of a self-reporting questionnaire to
be sent out to all schools in Singapore. One of the main
objectives of the questionnaire is to assess the level of
ICT integration in schools by identifying the various
socio-cultural elements that influence the successful
integration of ICT in schools. The other objectives are to
serve as a screening phase to identify the case studies for
phase two of the study, and to refine and guide the
direction of phase two of the study. The questionnaire
explored different aspects of ICT integration in schools
that include school ICT culture (leadership support,
exchange of ideas and experiences, and extent of staff
involvement in review of school ICT program), pupil
use of ICT (proficiency of pupils in the use of ICT and
pupils‟ usage for learning), teacher use of ICT (teachers‟
proficiency in the use of ICT and integration of ICT by
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teachers in the classroom), management of ICT
resources (accessibility to ICT resources and monitoring
process of ICT resources to optimize usage), and staff
development (opportunities for staff development in the
area of ICT integration and review of staff development
to meet the needs of ICT integration).
The finding showed that a sociocultural approach
towards the study of ICT in schools rejects the view that
ICT can be studied in isolation; it must be studied within
the learning environment and the broader context in
which it is situated. The paper has argued for a more
holistic approach of studying ICT in schools by adopting
a sociocultural perspective. It proposes a theoretical
framework based on the activity system as a unit of
analysis that is surrounded by different levels of
ecological circles.
National Policy for ICT in Education
Information and communication technology is a
powerful tool for the development of quality teaching
and learning; it is a catalyst for a radical change in the
existing school practices and an absolute vehicle for
preparing students for the future [11]. Success in the
implementation of an ICT policy will be dependent on
the recognition of the importance of strategic application
to education and sustainable implementation.
Maximizing ICT potentials will involve quality ICT
policy, greater involvement of private and public sectors
in the funding of the implementation, and proper
implementation and monitoring.
Different countries in the world have national ICT
policy. When we see specifically the strategy “Human
Resource Development” in ICT policy, the Ethiopian
Government is offering ICT education and training in
secondary and tertiary educational institutions with the
aim of creating ICT literacy and the basis for the
proliferation of ICT professionals in the country [6].
When the ICT development sector gets strengthening,
the need for ICT professionals will continue to grow side
by side. On top of this, in order to make the community
benefit from ICT, it will be appropriate to equip it with
basic knowledge and awareness of computer and related
technology.
Dimension in ICT Learning
According to Paas [7], there are three separate
aspects of ICT in school education: a) Using ICT as a
tool to support teaching and learning processes, for
example using a word processor, spreadsheet or database
in other subject areas such as mathematics or science; b)
Learning through ICT where the ICT facility becomes
the whole learning environment by providing learning
materials, such as LMS (Learning Management System)
or Web-based learning; and c) Learning ICT as a
subject, that is to say learning the knowledge, concepts,
skills, and processes of ICT. Using ICT as a tool and
learning through ICT offer very little opportunity for
students to learn the knowledge, concepts, and skills
needed to master ICT as a subject. Learning ICT is more
than the ability to operate and use a computer system.
Hence, the acquisition of technical skills is only part of
the problems encountered in teaching and learning ICT
as a subject. Indeed, ICT education includes a
sophisticated set of higher-order skills and cognitive
abilities, such as analyzing, designing, implementing,
collecting and retrieving, organizing and managing,
interpreting and representing, evaluating and creating
information.
Comparison of ICT curricula among different countries
Kargiban and Kaffash [8] described that ICT now
plays an important role in the curriculum of England,
Malaysia, America, Canada, India, and China. It is not
only taught as a discrete subject but is also a useful tool
for other subjects in the curriculum. However, ICT as a
subject discipline in Malaysia and China is more or less
different compared to its characteristics in the National
Curriculum for England, America, India, and Canada.
ICT curriculum structure of England and America
has a constructivist theory background. But, the
curriculum structure of England in each subject includes
the key stage, and the programs of study set out what
pupils should be taught; and the attainment targets set
out the expected standards of pupils‟ performance [9]. It
is up to schools to choose how they organize their school
curriculum to include the programs of study. ICT tools
are used to find, use, analyze, interpret, evaluate and
present information for a range of purposes. The key
skills in the National Curriculum include: 1)
information-processing skill; 2) reasoning skill; 3)
enquiry skill; and 4) creative thinking skill and
evaluation skill.
The Jordan ICT curriculum [12] is split into three
levels: introductory, intermediate and advanced. At each
level there is the specification itself, the objectives
which a student is expected to attain and some
suggestions as to how these objectives might be met.
As stated in [13], the Education Policy of Botswana
aims to prepare Botswana for a transition from a
traditional agro-based to an industrial economy.
A study shows that the implementation of the ICT
content is not satisfactory in secondary schools in
Mongolia [14]. The study shows implementation gap
between urban and rural schools.
III. RESEARCH APPROACH/METHODS
In this research, first we thoroughly studied related
literature of ICT curriculum experience of other
countries. A set of contents were identified and selected
that are relevant to our ICT education. Moreover, we
reviewed related works on dimensions of ICT learning at
secondary schools.
A survey was conducted to collect both quantitative
and qualitative data about the status of ICT education in
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Ethiopian secondary schools. The instruments of the
study are questionnaires (for university instructors and
secondary school teaches), a structured Focus Group
Discussion for students, and a laboratory observation
(with a checklist). The instruments were pilot tested to
check content validity, readability, and estimate the time
needed by the participants.
Since the study was descriptive in nature,
convenience sampling was used. The sample consisted
of 4 departments from 3 private and public
universities/colleges that have ICT related education in
place and 10 secondary schools which comprise of
grades 9 up to 12.
The data collected through questionnaire and
observation checklist were tabulated and analyzed
manually. Data obtained through FGD which were in
Amharic were translated to English. After the data
gathered through FGDs were examined, they were
categorized in line with their similarities which served to
put related issues together in such a way that the data are
on the basis of the research questions. Rationality of the
data was achieved using triangulation methods by
comparing students' perspective, instructors‟ perspective
and researcher‟s observation perspective of events.
Finally, conclusion was made based on the result of the
analysis.
Research Questions
This study attempted to address the following basic
questions:
1. Are the current ICT syllabi relevant and
appropriate to Ethiopian secondary schools?
2. To what extent our secondary school ICT
curriculum contents are in line with other
developed and developing countries?
3. Which knowledge and skills of ICT education
students gain at secondary school that help them
in the world of work and further study in higher
education?
4. What is the status of teachers‟ qualification to
teach ICT at secondary schools?
5. What is the status of resource availability
(computers, computer laboratories, Internet
connection, software, etc.) to teach ICT at
secondary schools?
6. To what extent are relevant and appropriate ICT
textbooks, teachers‟ guides and reference
materials available?
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The main focus of this research is to explore the
implementation status of the current ICT curriculum,
availability of all the required inputs, and forward
recommendations for the proper implementation of the
ICT curriculum in Ethiopian secondary schools by
assessing the need of students, teachers and educators.
Accordingly, based on the analysis, the following major
results were drawn.
 ICT teachers’ background and training to teach the
current ICT curriculum:
The educational background and training of ICT
teachers is acceptable (98%) in Addis Ababa but in
other regions, according to the annual educational
abstract of 2011/12 [16], it is very low and qualified
teachers at secondary schools is less than 60%. This
shows that most schools don‟t have adequate and
qualified ICT teachers. Similarly, most of the ICT
teachers did not obtain any training related to the new
contents like control and learning with Logo and
image processing and multimedia systems before
implementing the curriculum at secondary schools.
This shows that our schools don‟t have qualified ICT
teachers in every region.
ICT teaching learning process lacks teachers‟
pedagogical science knowledge as well as other
subject matter knowledge and skills to implement the
current curriculum contents. The research shows that
most (95%) teachers are doing their work with their
instinctive knowledge of teaching (lecturing) and this
has a negative implication on the teaching learning
process and teachers don‟t get in-service training to
improve their teaching profession.
 Availability of ICT resources at school ICT
laboratories
A related challenge is that all public schools have
limited resources and low access to the Internet.
Those schools that have Internet connectivity provide
e-mail service only, and it is available only to the
administration and teachers. Access to ICT resources
by teachers is also limited, especially to computers,
which makes it difficult to assume that teachers can
effectively transfer ICT knowledge and skills in their
teaching.
Observation of ICT laboratories at schools showed
that teachers couldn‟t help students to develop
practical skills due to lack of resources. Mostly more
than five students sit on one computer just to see not
to practice the ICT lessons. ICT Laboratories are not
sufficient at schools, 50-75 students entered in one
laboratory session in public schools. This indicates
teachers face big challenges to conduct ICT practical
sessions in laboratories.
When we see computer student ratio, 85% of all the
surveyed schools have a ratio in between 1:3-1:6 and
in private schools the ratio is 1:2. In 5% of the public
schools, computer student ratio is above 1:6.
Every lesson of ICT should be supported by practice
in computer laboratories for better knowledge and
skills to be acquired and developed by students. This
implies that due attention is not given to the field.
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 Therefore, supervision and support is expected from experiences of other countries, it will be advisable to
responsible bodies to organize additional ICT replace these difficult contents by appropriate and
laboratories to reduce big class sizes in one feasible ones in subsequent revisions.
laboratory session in order to bring better change in Table 2: Difficult contents from the current ICT curriculum
the education system. In addition, teachers‟ practical
skills of ICT need to be upgraded with short in-
service training on new and difficult contents. No. of participants claimed
difficult to teach
 Appropriateness of the name ICT to the Subject Content
Sec. school University
As shown in Table 1, most of the participants of the Teachers Instructors
university instructors (80%) and secondary school
ICT teachers (81%) are in favor of the name ICT to Exploring the Internet 84% -
the subject but some considerable number of Basic troubleshooting 15% 44%
university instructors (20%) and secondary school
ICT teachers (19%) disagree with the name ICT for Image processing and
86% 82%
the subject. multimedia system
Table 1: Participants’ opinion regarding the name of the Control and learning with
46% 89%
subject ICT Logo
Do You Agree with the name ICT Yes No Information and
- 6%
computer security
University instructors 80% 20%
Secondary school teachers 81% 19% The reasons given and the percentage of secondary school
teachers are shown in Table 3.
Various reasons were given by the participants,
among which the major ones are the following. Table 3: Reasons given for the contents considered difficult to
- ICT has a broad meaning, so it is better to use a teach
more specific name appropriate to the subject
such as “Introduction to Computers”. Reason Percentage of teachers
- ICT is a broad term that encompasses all sorts of Lack of training 44%
communications and devices such as computers Lack of computers 73%
and computer networks. So, it will be better to use
“Computer and its Applications”. Lack of Internet access 92%
- Since ICT holds information and communication Lack of software 53%
together, it is not an appropriate name for the
 Students’ interest to learn ICT
subject.
 Participants’ perception on the major changes made The research finding showed that 31% of ICT
on versions of ICT curriculum contents teachers responded that most students have no
interest to learn ICT because of different reasons.
The ICT curriculum has been revised three times The major reasons given are: a) students are forced to
since 1994 in every five years. As per the study, 89% give attention to other subjects which appear in
of the participants indicated that the previous first grades 10 and 12 national examinations, b) there are
and second versions were generic and limited only to no sufficient resources in the computer laboratories
application software. But, the current version is good to acquire the expected knowledge and skills, and c)
and includes many ICT fundamental concepts. But students in the private schools know the contents at
participants said that the allotted time to cover the earlier grade levels which teachers are able to teach
content is in question and some contents need proper with certain constraints.
scoping and feasibility.
 Quality of ICT textbooks and availability of reference
 Contents of the current ICT curriculum that are materials
difficult to teach/learn
The role of quality textbooks and reference materials
As shown in Table 2, the research identified difficult is very significant for the students as well as the
contents due to different reasons from the current teachers for teaching ICT. Most of the teachers
ICT curriculum. These are, for secondary school (62%) said that they don‟t get any reference materials
teachers and university instructors, respectively, in their school libraries and 29% of them said that
Exploring the Internet (84%, -), Control and Learning they have access to some reference materials about
with Logo (46%, 89%), and Image Processing and old application software. This evidence indicates that
Multimedia Systems (86%, 82). Based on the views there are no relevant reference materials in school
of the study participants and considering the libraries that support ICT education in secondary
8
 schools. Teachers and students don‟t have
opportunity to enrich their ICT knowledge and skills
by using additional reference materials apart from the
knowledge they acquire by using the basic
application software like MS Word, MS Excel, MS
Access and MS Publisher.
It was also indicated that ICT textbooks are in very
poor quality. Study participants said that textbooks
are full of irrelevant paragraphs, they recommend
unavailable software, they do not have details on the
use of new software, etc.
In addition, there is no Internet access to browse for
additional materials to consolidate and deepen their
knowledge.
 Knowledge and skills of ICT that students should
gain and develop at secondary schools
Most of the university instructors (92%) said that
students at this level should develop basic computer
skills to operate computers, acquire some theoretical
knowledge about ICT, and become competent in
using the Internet which are enough for secondary
school students. They indicated that in order to go
beyond the mentioned ones and upgrade content so as
to use other countries‟ experience is a very difficult
task since our limited resources don‟t allow to
include other contents.
Some respondents (46%) have different opinion on
what students should learn. They said that students
should learn basic computer knowledge in addition to
some important knowledge and skills like data
handling to help them in the world of work and to
continue with their study at higher education.
Therefore, contents should go in line with other
developing and developed countries‟ experience.
V. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Conclusions
Computer studies intend to furnish students with a
broad knowledge of the nature of information processing
and how ICT is used today. In Ethiopia, ICT education
has been provided for secondary school students since
2000. Considering the findings of this study, it is
concluded that the provision of ICT education at
secondary schools in Ethiopia is very poor with the
following reasons. The current ICT curriculum didn‟t
consider students background knowledge of computers
and feasibility in our school situation and other
countries‟ experience of the world. Most schools don‟t
have qualified ICT teachers; don‟t get training on new
contents and lack pedagogical science knowledge.
Moreover, secondary schools do not have sufficient ICT
equipment and facilities and suffer from scarcity of all
types of ICT resources. More than five students sit in
one computer just to see but not to practice the ICT
lessons. So, most students have no interest to learn ICT.
In addition, the textbooks and teachers guides are of
very poor quality and ICT reference materials are not
available at schools except books of application software
of old versions. These problems affect the ICT
teaching/learning process and neither of the concerned
bodies seem to make any interventions. Therefore, the
curriculum needs revision and reconsidering those
contents considered not appropriate to students‟
background and schools concrete situation. Then,
prioritize, exclude and replace them by appropriate
contents to keep the curriculum standard.
As regards to ICT Knowledge and skills that students
should acquire and develop in secondary schools,
university instructors and literature review similarly
indicated that the curriculum should include topics like
basic computer manipulation with hardware and
software issues, computer applications, basic computer
troubleshooting, assembly and upgrading, problem
solving and some basic programming concepts like basic
web page design, basics of networking and
communication, and exploring the Internet with Internet
safety.
Recommendations
The study focuses on the status of ICT education
curriculum in implementation for the past fifteen years.
Most of the research findings need consideration and
supervision by the concerned government sector and
non-government bodies. Therefore, based on the
findings of the study, the following recommendations
are given as possible ways to improve the curriculum
and the teaching learning process.
 Recruit qualified teachers from the market and in
addition provide in-service training on pedagogy and
new contents for non-qualified teachers.
 Equip school ICT laboratories with required
resources like hardware, software and Internet
connection.
 Naming of the subject ICT was controversial by
different educators. The research finding indicated
that the ICT contents lack communication. Therefore,
the future ICT curriculum should include some basic
knowledge of networking and communication media
and devices in more detail.
 Quality teaching learning materials (textbooks and
teachers guides) and availability of reference
materials have a great role for the provision of
quality education. Also they broaden students‟
learning experiences to meet different learning needs.
However, ICT textbooks are not developed properly
and ICT reference materials are not available at
schools. Therefore, concerned bodies should involve
and support to develop quality textbooks and teachers
guides. In addition, schools should be supported with
reference materials and Internet infrastructures for
students and teachers to browse information related
to ICT to broaden their knowledge.
9
 The finding indicated that students have no interest to [12] Ministry of Education, “A Model Standard ICT Curriculum of
follow the ICT subject at secondary schools because Middle and High Schools General Guidelines for
Comprehensive Secondary Education”, Hashemite Kingdom of
of different reason. To motivate students, concerned Jordan (Amman), 1997.
bodies should fulfill the resources, revise the [13] P. T. Ramatsui, “Botswana Senior Secondary ICT Syllabus:
curriculum, and make the subject to appear at Revised National Policy on Education”, Gabarone, 1994.
national examination. [14] Uyanga Sambuu and Munkhtuyu Lxagvasuren , “Evaluation on
ICT Education Contents Linkages in General and Tertiary
 Based on the opinion of respondents and the Education of Mongolia” National University of Mongolia and
experience of other countries, the study suggested for Mongolian State University of Education [2008 – 2009].
the curriculum to include the following topics at the [15] Cher Ping Lim “A theoretical framework for the study of ICT in
various grade levels with varying complexity: 1) schools: a proposal”, British Journal of Educational Technology,
Computer system, 2) Computer and its applications, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2002.
3) Computer care and safety, 4) Basic computer [16] Ministry of Education, EMIS, “Education Statistics Annual
troubleshooting (assembly and upgrading), 5) Abstract 2004 E.C (2011/12 G.C)”, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
2012.
Information system and social media tools, 6)
Networks and communication, 7) Exploring the
Internet and Internet Safety, 8) Basic application of
ICT in real life, and 9) Problem solving and some
basic programming concepts.
Future Work
Due to time and financial constraints, the research has
been done on a sample of ten urban private and public
secondary schools and three public and private
universities/colleges in Addis Ababa. As a future work,
the status of ICT education in Ethiopian secondary
schools will be studied in a wider and deeper scope,
taking into consideration sample urban and rural schools
from all over the regions of the country.

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Book Company, United States of America, 1985.
[6] Clement Dzidonu, “The National ICT for Development (ICT4D)
Five Years Action Plan for Ethiopia [2006 – 2010] ”, A United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Initiative, 2006.
[7] Leslie Paas, “How Information and Communications
Technologies Can Support Education for Sustainable
Development”, 2008.
[8] Zohreh Abedi Kargiban and Hamid Reza Kaffash,” ICT
Curriculum in Secondary School: A Comparison of Information
and Communication Technology in the Curriculum among
England, America, Canada, China, India, and Malaysia”, 2012.
[9] Patti Swarts, “ICT as Core and as Elective Subject: Issues to
Consider”, 2004.
[10] Curriculum Corporation on behalf of its members, “Statements
of Learning for Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT)”, Australia, 2006.
[11] Mudasiru Olalere Yusuf, “Information and Communication
Technology and Education: Analysing the Nigerian National
Policy for Information Technology”, International Education
Journal, 2005.

10
 The Development of Amharic Morphological
Analyzer Using Memory Based Learning
Mesfin Abate
Department of Computer Science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
messyimam@gmail.com
Abstract— Morphological analysis of highly inflected
languages like Amharic is non-trivial task because of the
complexity of the morphology. In this paper, we proposed a
supervised data-driven experimental approach to develop
Amharic morphological analyzer. We used a memory-based
supervised machine learning method which extrapolates new
unseen classes based on previous examples in memory. We
treated morphological analysis as a classification task which
retrieves the grammatical functions and properties of
morphologically inflected words. As the task was geared towards
analyzing the vowelled inflected Amharic words with their
grammatical functions of morphemes, the morphological
structure of words and the way how they are represented in
memory-based learning was exhaustively investigated. The
performance of the model was evaluated using 10-fold cross
validation with IB1 and IGtree algorithms resulting in the over
all accuracy of 93.6% and 82.3%, respectively.
Keywords— Amharic Morphology; Memory-Based Learning;
Morphological Analysis
Introduction
Morphological analysis helps to find the minimal units
of a word which holds linguistic information for further
processing. Morphological analysis plays a critical role in
the development of natural language processing (NLP)
applications. In most practical language technology
applications, morphological analysis is used to perform
lemmatization in which words can be segmented into
its minimal meaning [11]. In morphologically complex
languages, morphological analysis is also a core
component in information retrieval, text
summarization, question answering, machine
translation, etc. There are two broad categories of
approaches in computational morphology: rule-based
and corpus-based. Currently, the most widely applied
Yaregal Assabie
Department of Computer Science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
yaregal.assabie@aau.edu.et
rule-based approach to computational morphology uses
the two-level formalism. In rule-based approach, the
formulation of rules for languages makes the
development of morphological analysis system costly
and time consuming [4], [11]. Because of a need of
hand crafted rules for the morphology of languages and
intensive requirements of linguistic experts in rule
based approaches, there is considerable interest in
robust machine learning approaches to morphology
which extracts linguistic knowledge automatically from
an annotated or unannotated corpus. Machine learning
approaches have two learning paradigm: unsupervised
and supervised learning. Supervised approach learns by
example where as unsupervised approach is learning by
patterns. Machine learning approaches that use
supervised learning paradigm include inductive logic
programming (ILP), support vector machine (SVM),
hidden Markov model (HMM) and memory-based
learning (MBL). These paradigms have been used to
implement low-level linguistic analysis such as
morphological analysis [2], [3], [7]. Among various
alternatives, the choice of the approach depends on the
problem at hand. In our work, we employed MBL to
develop morphological analyzer for Amharic, partly
motivated by the limitations of previous attempts using
rule-based [7] and ILP [10] approaches. Memory-based
learning has a promising feature in analyzing NLP tasks
like POS, text translation, chunking and morpho-
phonology due to its capabilities of incremental learning
from examples. Among the MBL algorithms, IB1 and
11
IGtree are known to be popular. Both algorithms rely on
the k nearest neighbor classifier which uses some
distance metric to measure the distance between each
neighbors of features [4], [5], [9].
The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents the characteristics of Amharic language with
special emphasis on its morphology. In Section 3, we present
the proposed system for morphological analysis. Section 4
presents experimental results, and conclusion and future works
are highlighted in Section 5. References are provided at the
end.
Characteristics of Amharic Language
The Amharic Language
Amharic is an official working language of Ethiopia
and it is widely spoken throughout the country as a first
and a second language. It is the Semitic branch of the
supper family of Afro-asiatic languages and thus related
to Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. Amharic is the second
widely spoken Semitic language, next to Arabic. It uses a
unique script called “fidel” which is conveniently
written in a tabular format of seven columns. The first
column represents the basic form and the other orders
are derived from it by more or less regular
modifications indicating the different vowels. The vowel
in the script is the character “አ” along with its six
derived forms. Amharic has 33 base characters and this
leads to have a total of 231 (=33*7) Amharic characters.
In addition, there are about two scores of labialized
characters such as ሏ(lwa), ሟ(mwa) ሯ(rwa) ሷ(swa),
etc. used by the language for writing.
Amharic Morphology
Like other Semitic languages, Amharic is one of the
most morphologically complex languages. It exhibits a
root-pattern morphological phenomenon [1]. Root is a
set of consonants (also called radicals) which has a basic
lexical meaning [12]. A pattern consists of a set of
vowels which are inserted among the consonants of a
root to form a stem. Semitic languages, particularly
Amharic verbal stems consist of a “root + vowels +
template” merger. For instance, the root verb 'sbr' + ee
+ CVCVC leads to form the stem 'seber' (“ሰበር”/‘broke’).
In addition to such non-concatenative morphological
features, Amharic uses different affixes to create
inflectional and derivational morpheme. Affixation can
be prefix, infix, suffix and circumfix. The morphological
complexity of the language is better understood by
looking at the ford formation process through inflection
and derivation.
Inflection
Amharic nouns are inflected for number, definiteness,
cases (accusative/objective, possessive/genitive) and
gender. Amharic adjectives, in a similar affixation
process to that of nouns, can be marked for number,
definiteness, cases and gender. The affixation of
morphemes to express numbers is similar with nouns
except with some plural formation. On the other hand,
Amharic verbs are inflected for any combinations of
person, gender, number, case, tense/aspect and mood.
As a result of this, tens of thousands of verbs (in surface
forms) are generated from a single verbal root. As verbs
are marked for various grammatical units, a single verb
can form a complete sentence as shown in the example
yisebreñal (‘he will break me’). This verb (sentence) is
analyzed as follows.
verbal root: sbr (‘to break’)
verbal stem: sebr (‘will break’)
subject: yi…al (he)
object: eñ (me)
Derivation
Amharic nouns can be derived from adjectives, verbal
roots (by inserting vowels between consonants), stems,
stem-like verbs and nouns themselves. Few primary
adjectives (which are not derived) exist in the language.
However, many adjectives can be derived from nouns,
stems, compound words and verbal roots. Adjectives
can also be derived either from roots by intercalation of
vocalic elements or attaching a suffix to bound stems.
Amharic verbs can also be derived from different verbal
stems in many ways.
12
 The Proposed Amharic
Morphological Analyzer
System Architecture
As memory based learning is a machine learning
approach, our morphological analyzer contains a training
phase which consists of morpheme annotation to
manually annotate inflected Amharic words, feature
extraction to create instances in a fixed length of
windows, parameter optimization and algorithm selection
to tune and select some of the parameters and algorithms.
On the other hand, the morphological analysis
component contains the feature extraction to de-construct
a given text, morpheme identification to classify and
extrapolate, stem and root extraction to label segmented
inflected words with their morpheme functions. The
architecture of the proposed Amharic morphological
analyzer is depicted in Figure 1.
Training Phase
The training process requires sample patterns of words
showing the changes in the internal structures of words.
Amharic morphemes may predominantly be expressed by
internal phonological changes in the root. These internal
irregular changes of phonemes make the morphological
analysis cumbersome. It is not a trivial task in finding the
roots of Amharic verbs. Hence, we investigated the
morphological formation of Amharic language,
particularly nouns and verbs. Adjectives have similar
derivation and inflection process to that of nouns. A
morphological database is built after identifying the
common property of all morphological formations of
Amharic nouns (and adjectives) and grammatical features
of all the morphemes. As to Amharic verbs, it is too
difficult to find a single representation or patterns of
verbs as they are different in types due to a number of
morphological and phonological processes. Therefore,
we consider the most significant part of the word stem
which bears meaning next to the roots. In Amharic
grammar, the stem of a word is the main part which
remains unchanged when the ending changes. Thus, we
manually annotate sample words with their patterns
where the data will be used as training data.
Morpheme Annotation
Amharic nouns have more than 2 and 7 affixes in the
prefix and suffix position, respectively. The affixation is
not somehow arbitrary, rather they affix in ordered
manner. An Amharic noun consists of a lexical part, or
stem and one or more grammatical parts. This is easy to
see with a noun, for example, the Amharic noun
ቤቶቻቸውን (bEtocacewn/their houses). The lexical part
is the stem ቤት (bEt/house); this conveys most of the
important content in the noun. Since the stem cannot
be broken into smaller meaningful units [8], it is a
morpheme (a primitive unit of meaning). The word
contains three grammatical suffixes, each of which
provides information that is more abstract and less
crucial to the understanding of the word than the
information provided by the stem: -oc, -acew, and -n.
Each of these suffixes can be seen as providing a value
for a particular grammatical feature (or dimension along
which Amharic nouns can vary): -oc (plural marker), -
acew (third person plural neuter), and -n: (accusative).
Since each of these suffixes cannot be broken down
further, they can be considered as a morpheme.
Generally, these grammatical morphemes can have a
great role in understanding the semantics of the whole
word [7], [12].
13
 Memory-Based Learning

Learning Model

No

Yes

Training Phase Morphological Analysis

Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed Amharic morphological analyzer

Table 1. Example showing annotation of nouns

The following tasks were identified and performed to
prepare annotated datasets used for training:
identifying inflected words; segmenting the word in to
prefix, stem, suffix; putting boundary marker between
each segment; and describing the representation of
each marker. Morphemes that are attached next to the
stem (as suffixes) may have seven purposes:
plurality/possessions, derivation, relativazation,
definiteness, negation, causative and conjection. The
annotation is according to the prefix-stem-suffix ([P]-
Amharic verbs have four slots for prefixes and four
[S]-[S]) structure as shown in Table 1. The bracket ([ ])
slots for suffixes [1], [7], [10]. The positions of the
can be filled with the appropriate grammatical features affixes are shown as follows, where prep|conj is for
for each segmentation where S, M, 1, K, D, and O preposition or conjunction; rel is for relativation; neg is
indicate end of stem, plural, possession, preposition, for negation; subj is for subject; appl-applicative;
derivative and object markers, respectively. Lexicons obj|def is for objective (definiteness) or object; and acc
were prepared manually in such a way to be suitable for is for accusative.
extraction purpose.

14

In addition to analyzing all these affixes, the root
template pattern of Amharic verbs makes its
morphological analysis complex. It is a challenging task
representing its features into suitable memory based
learning approach. Generally, Amharic verb stems are
broken into verb roots and grammatical templates. A
given root can be combined with more than 40
templates [1]. The stem is the lexical part of the verb
and also the source of most of its complexity. To
consider all morphologically productive of the verb
types, we need a morphologically annotated word list
with its possible inflection forms. Then, the tokens are
manually annotated in similar fashion what we did for
nouns and adjectives like prefix [ ], stem [ ] and suffix [ ]
pattern. The “* +” can be filled with the appropriate
grammatical features for each segmentation. The
sample annotation for verbs is shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Examples of annotated verbs
Feature Extraction
Once the annotated words are stored in a database,
instances are extracted automatically from the
morphological database based on the concept of
windowing method [2] in a fixed length of left and right
context. Each instance is associated with a class. The
class represents the morphological category in which
the given word posses. An instance usually consists of a
vector of fixed length. The vector is built up of n feature
value pairs depending on the length of the vector. Each
example focuses on one letter, and includes a fixed
number of left and right neighbor letters using 8–1 to 8-
1 windows which yields eighteen features. The largest
word length from the manually annotated data base is
chosen to be the length of windows size. The input
character in focus, plus the eight preceding and eight
following characters are placed in the windows.
Character based analysis gives concern for each
character or letter to be considered. From the basic
annotation, instances were automatically extracted, to
be suitable to memory based learning by sliding a
window over the word in the lexicon.
For instance, the character based representation of
the word ስለሰበረችው (sleseberecw) is shown in Table
3. The ‘=’ sign is used as a filter symbol which shows
there is no character at that position. The construction
of instances displays the 11 instances derived from the
Amharic word and its associated classes. The class of
the third instance is “K” representing the preposition
morpheme ‘sle’ ending with the prefix 'e'. Therefore,
character based representation of words exhaustively
transcribes their deep structure of phonological process
and segments each character one at a time.
Table 3. Character based feature extraction of the word '
sleseberecw'
Memory-Based Learning
Memory based approaches borrow some of the
advantages of both probabilistic and knowledge-based
methods to successfully implement it in NLP tasks [5]. It
performs classification by analogy. In order to learn any
NLP classification problem, different algorithms and
concepts are implemented by reusing data structures.
We used TiMBL as a learning tool for our task [2]. There
are a number of parameters to be tuned in memory
based learning using TiMBL. Therefore, to get an
optimal accuracy of the model we used the default
15
settings and also tuned some of the parameters. The
optimized parameters are the MVDM (modified value
difference metric) and chi-square from distance metrics,
IG (information gain) from weighting metrics, ID
(inverse distance) from class voting weights, and k from
the nearest neighbor. These optimized parameters are
used together with the different classifiers. The
classifier engines we used are IGtree and IB1 which
construct databases of instances in memory during the
learning process. The procedure of building an IGtree is
described in [6]. Instances are classified by IGTree or by
IBI by matching them to all instances in the instance
base. As a result of this process, we get a memory
based learning model which will be used later during
the morphological analysis phase.
Morphological Analysis
The training phase is the backbone of the morphological
analysis module to successfully implement the system.
The morphological analysis is implemented by using the
memory-based learning model. Therefore, in this phase,
the feature extraction is used to make the input words
to be suitable for memory based learning classification,
the morpheme identification is applied to classify and
extrapolate the class of new instances, the stem
extraction process reconstructs and inserts identified
morphemes, and finally the root extraction is used to
get root forms and stems with their grammatical
functions.
Feature Extraction
Memory based learning learns new instances by storing
previous training data into memory. When a new word
is given to be analyzed by the system, it accepts and de-
construct as instances to make similar representation
with the one stored in memory. Feature extraction in
this section is different from the one described in the
training phase. The word is de-constructed in a fixed-
length of instances with out listing (identifying) the class
labels at the last index. For example, when a new
previously unseen word (which is not found in the
memory) needs to be segmented, the words are
similarly deconstructed and represented as instances
using the same information. This instance is compared
to each and every instance in the training set, recorded
by the memory-based learner. In doing so, the classifier
will try to find training instance in memory that most
closely resembles it. For instance, the word በጎች
(begoc) is segmented and its features are extracted as
shown in Figure 2.
Fig. 2. Feature extraction for morphological analysis
Morpheme Identification
When new or unknown inflected words are de-
constructed as instances and given to the system to be
analyzed, an extrapolation is performed to assign the
most likely neighborhood class with its morphemes
based on their boundaries. The extrapolation is based
on the similarity metric applied on the training data. If
there is an exact match on the memory, the classifier
returns (extrapolates) the class of that instance to the
new instance. Otherwise, new instance is classified by
analogy in memory with a similar feature vector, and
extrapolating a decision from their class. For example,
the feature of the unknown verb ለነገረችው
(lenegerecw) can be segmented as shown in Figure 3.
This instance is compared to each and every instance in
the training set, recorded by the memory-based
learner. In doing so, the classifier tries to find that
training instance in memory that most closely
resembles it. Taking the feature of ለነገረችው
(lenegerecw) as shown in Figure 3, this might be
instance 10 in Table 3, as they share almost all features
(L8, L7, L5, L3- L1, F, R1- R8), except L6 and L4. In this
case, the memory-based learner then extrapolates the 9
classes of this training instance and predicts it to be the
class of the new instance.
Fig. 3. Instances for the unknown token ለነገረችው (lenegerecw)
Stem Extraction
After appropriate morphemes are identified, the next
step is the stem extraction process. In stem extraction,
16
reconstruction of individual instances into meaningful
units (to their original word form) and insertions of
identified morphemes in their segmentation points are
performed. After stem extraction, the system searches
resembling instances from previously stored patterns in
memory. If there is no similar instance in memory, it
uses a distance similarity matrix to find more nearest
neighbor. The modified value difference metric (MVDM)
which looks for the co-occurrence of the values with the
target classes is used to determine the similarity of the
value of features. For example, the reconstruction of
the whole instances of the word 'slenegerecw' is shown
in Figure 4. In the example, four non-null classes are
predicted in the classification step. In the second step
the letter of the morphemic segments are concatenated
and morphemes are inserted. Then, root extraction can
be performed in the third step.
Fig. 4. Reconstruction of the word 'slenegerecw'
Root Extraction
The smallest unit morpheme for nouns and adjectives
is the stem. Thus, the root extraction process will not be
applied on nouns and adjectives. Root extraction in
verbal stems is not complex task in Amharic as roots are
consonants of verbal stems. In order to extract the root
from verbal stems, we simply remove the vowels from
verbal stems. However, there are exceptions as vowels
in some verbal stems (e.g. when the verbal stems start
with vowels) serve as consonants. In addition, vowels
should not be removed from mono- and bi-radical verb
types since they have valid meaning when they end
with vowels.
Experiment
The Corpus
In order to evaluate the performance of the model and
the capability of learn-ability of the dataset we
conducted the experiment by combining nouns and
verbs. To get unbiased estimate of the accuracy of a
model learned through machine learning, it should be
tested on unseen data which is not present in the
training set. Therefore, we split our data set in to
training and testing. The total number of our corpus
contains 1022 words, of which 181 are verbs and 841
are nouns (adjectives are considered as nouns as they
have similar analysis). The number of instances
extracted from nouns and adjectives are 1356 and from
verbs are 6719 which accounts a total of 8075
instances. A total of 26 different class labels occur
within these instances.
Test Results
Simply splitting the corpus into a single training and testing
set may not give the best estimate of the system’s
performance. Thus, we used 10-fold cross-validation
technique to test the performance of the system with IB1 and
IGtree algorithms. This means that the data is split in ten
equal partitions, and each of these is used once as test set,
with the other nine as corresponding training set. This way,
all examples are used at least once as a test item, while
keeping training and test data carefully separated, and the
memory-based classifier is trained each time on 90% of the
available training data. We also used leave-one-out (LOO)
cross-validation for IB1 algorithm, which uses all available
data except one (n-1) example as training material. It tests
the classifier on the one held-out example by repeating it for
all examples. However, we found it time consuming to use
leave-one-out cross-validation for IGtree algorithm. Table 4
shows the performance of the system for optimized
parameters.
Table 4. Test result for Amharic morphological analysis
Evaluation Type of Time taken Space requirement Accuracy
method algorithm
(in seconds) (in bytes) (%)
LOO IB1 30.99000 1,327,460 96.40
IB1 0.82077 1,213,656 93.59
10-fold
IGtree 0.03711 1,136,582 82.26
17
 Conclusion [11] G. Pauw and G. Schryver. Improving the Computational Morphological
Analysis of a Swahili Corpus for Lexicographic Purposes. Lexikos,
18:303, 318, 2008.
Many high-level NLP applications heavily rely on a
[12] B. Yimam. የአማርኛ ሰዋስው (Amharic Grammar), 2nd ed. Eleni Printing
good morphological analyzer. Few attempts have been Press, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2000.
made so far to develop an efficient morphological
analyzer for Amharic. However, due to the complexity
of the inherent characteristics of the language, it was
found to be difficult to develop a full-fledged Amharic
morphological analyzer. This research work is aimed at
developing Amharic morphological analyzer using
memory-based approach. As compared to previous
works, our system performed well and provided
promising results. For example, in the work of Gasser
[7], the system (which is rule-based) does not consider
unseen or unknown words. To overcome this problem,
Mulugeta and Gasser [10] developed Amharic
morphological analyzer using IPL. However, our system
still performs better in terms of accuracy. Thus, our
work adds value in the overall effort to dealing the
complex problem of developing Amharic morphological
analyzer. The performance of our system can be further
enhanced by increasing the training data. Future work is
recommended to be directed at looking into the
morpheme segmentation on individual instances.
Segmentation on the full words and insertions of
grammatical features in each segmented morphemes is
expected to boost the performance of the system.

REFERENCES
[1] S. Amsalu and D. Gibbon. Finite state morphology of Amharic. In Proc.
of Inter. Conf. on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing.
Borovets, pp 47–51, 2005.
[2] A. Bosch and W. Daelemans. Memory-based morphological analysis. In
Proc. of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics. Stroudsburg, 1999.
[3] V. Bosch, et al. An efficient memory-based morpho-syntactic tagger and
parser for Dutch, In Proc. of the 17th Meeting Comp. Ling. in the
Netherlands. Leuven, Belgium, 2007.
[4] A. Clark. Memory-Based Learning of Morphology with Stochastic
Transducers. In Proc. of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for
Comp. Ling., Philadelphia, 2002.
[5] W. Daelemans and A. Bosch. Memory-Based Language Processing.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.
[6] W. Daelemans, A. Bosch and Ton Weijters. IGTree: Using Trees for
Compression and Classification in Lazy Learning Algorithms. Artificial
Intell. Review 11:407-423, 1997.
[7] M. Gasser (2011). HornMorpho: a system for morphological processing
of Amharic, Oromo, and Tigrinya, In Proc. of Conf. on Human Lang.
Tech. for Dev., Egypt, 2011.
[8] H. Hammarstrom and L. Borin. Survey Article Unsupervised Learning
of Morphology, Computational Linguistics, 37(2), 309-350, 2011.
[9] E. Marsi, A. Bosch and A. Soudi. Memory-based morphological analysis
generation and part-of-speech tagging of Arabic. In Proc. of the ACL
Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, pp 1–8,
2005.
[10] W. Mulugeta and M. Gasser. Learning Morphological Rules for Amharic
Verbs Using Inductive Logic Programming. In Proc. of
SALTMIL8/AfLaT, 2012.

18
 Amharic Anaphora Resolution Using
Knowledge-Poor Approach
Temesgen Dawit
Department of Computer Science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
temesgen.dawit.er@gmail.com
Abstract— Building complete anaphora resolution systems
that incorporate all linguistic information is difficult because of
the complexities of languages. In the case of Amharic, it is even
more difficult because of its complex morphology. In addition to
independent anaphors, Amharic has anaphors embedded inside
words (hidden anaphors). In this paper, we proposed Amharic
anaphora resolution system that also treats hidden anaphors, in
addition to independent ones. Hidden anaphors are extracted
using Amharic morphological analyzer. After anaphoric terms
are identified, their relationships with antecedents are built by
making use of the grammatical structure of the language along
with constraint and preference rules. The system is developed
based on knowledge-poor approach in the sense that we use low
levels of linguistic knowledge like morphology avoiding the need
of complex knowledge like semantics, world knowledge and
others. The performance of the system is evaluated using 10-fold
cross validation technique and experimental results are reported.
Keywords— Amharic anaphora resolution; knowledge-poor
algorithm; hidden anaphors
Introduction
Anaphora resolution is a technique or phenomena of
pointing back to an entity in a given text that has been
introduced with more descriptive phrase in the text
than the entity or expression which is referring back.
The entity referred in the text can be anything like
object, concept, individual, process, or any other thing
[12]. The expression which is referring back is called
anaphor whereas the previous expression being
referred is called antecedent [2]. Anaphora can be
categorized as pronominal anaphora, lexical noun
phrase anaphora, noun anaphora, verb anaphora,
adverb anaphora or zero anaphora based on the form
of the anaphor or syntactic category of the anaphor.
Based on the location of the antecedents in the text,
anaphors can also be classified into intrasentential or
intersentential [9], [16], [18]. Anaphora resolution is a
complex task which needs various types of linguistic
Yaregal Assabie
Department of Computer Science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
yaregal.assabie@aau.edu.et
knowledge such as morphology, syntax, semantics,
discourse and pragmatics. Furthermore, different
disciplines such as logic, philosophy, psychology,
communication theory and other related fields are also
involved in the process of anaphora resolution [8]. Due
to such complexities and difficulties, most of the
researches performed in the area of anaphora
resolution were aimed at the resolution of pronouns or
one type of anaphora. Though the resolution of
anaphora is complex, it needs to be addressed strongly
as it is used as an important component in many natural
language processing (NLP) applications like information
extraction, question answering, machine translation,
text summarization, opinion mining, dialogue systems
and many others. Depending on the inherent
characteristics of languages, the process of anaphora
resolution may pass through several steps. Among the
most important steps are identification of anaphors,
identifying the location of candidates and selection of
an antecedent from the set of candidates [8]. Selection
of an antecedent from the set of candidates is made by
making use of constraint and preference rules [9], [14].
Constraint rules must be satisfied for any antecedent to
be considered as candidate antecedent for the
anaphora resolution. Gender, number and person
agreement [6], [11], [18] and selectional restrictions [9],
[18] are common constraint rules applied in most
languages. Preference rules give more preference to
antecedents when constraint rules are satisfied. They
are applied on antecedents that passed constraint rules
and when a certain anaphor has more than one
antecedent as a choice [9], [14]. Some of the preference
rules are definiteness [7], giveness [13], recency [5],
frequency of mention [9], etc.
19
 Based on the level of linguistic information required
to resolve anaphora, two broad categories have
emerged: knowledge-rich and knowledge-poor
approaches. Knowledge-rich anaphora resolution
approaches employ linguistic and domain knowledge in
great detail starting from the low-level morphological
knowledge to the very high level knowledge like world
knowledge. As a result, morphological analyzers,
syntactic analyzers, semantic analyzers, discourse
processors and domain knowledge extractors are
needed to deal with anaphora resolution using
knowledge-rich approaches [15]. On the other hand,
knowledge-poor approaches are formulated to avoid
the complex linguistic knowledge used in anaphora
resolution process. It is a result of looking for
inexpensive solutions to satisfy the need of NLP systems
in a practical way. The development of low-level NLP
tools like part-of-speech (POS) tagger and
morphological analyzer attracted the use of knowledge-
poor approach. In general, knowledge-poor anaphora
resolution approach depends on a set of constraint and
preference rules [13], [14]. Depending on the
characteristics of languages, several of the
aforementioned rules, techniques and approaches have
been used to develop anaphora resolution systems for
various languages across the world such as English [7],
Turkish [9], Norwegian [6], Estonian [15], Czech [17],
etc. However, to our best knowledge, there is no any
attempt to develop anaphora resolution system for
Amharic. Thus, this work is aimed at developing
anaphora resolution system for Amharic using
knowledge-poor approach as the language is under-
resourced with only limited number of NLP tools
available.
The remaining part of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents the characteristics of Amharic language with
special emphasis on its morphology and personal pronouns. In
Section 3, we present the proposed system for anaphora
resolution. Experimental results are presented in Section 4, and
conclusion and future works are highlighted in Section 5.
References are provided at the end.
Linguistic Characteristics of Amharic
The Amharic Language
Amharic is the working language of Ethiopia having a
population of over 90 million at present. Even though
many languages are spoken in Ethiopia, Amharic is
dominant and is spoken as a mother tongue by a large
segment of the population and it is the most commonly
learned second language throughout the country [10].
The language is categorized under the Semitic
languages family and it is the second most spoken
language among Semitic language families in the world,
next to Arabic. Though the language is widely spoken or
used as a working language in the country, it is still
considered to be “under-resourced” since linguistic
resources are not widely available. Amharic is written
using its own script having 34 consonants (base
characters), out of which six other characters
representing combinations of vowels and consonants
are derived for each character. The base characters
have the vowel ኧ(ä) and other derived characters have
vowels in the order of ኡ(u), ኢ(i), ኣ(a), ኤ(e), እ(ĭ), and
ኦ(o). For example, for the base character ረ(rä), the
following six characters are derived: ሩ(ru), ሪ(ri), ራ(ra),
ሬ(re), ር(r[ĭ]), and ሮ(ro). This leads to have a total of
34x7 (=231) Amharic characters. In addition, there are
about two scores of labialized characters such as
ሏ(lwa), ሟ(mwa) ሯ(rwa) ሷ(swa), etc. used by the
language for writing.
Amharic Morphology
Due to its Semitic characteristics, Amharic is one of the
most morphologically complex languages. Amharic
nouns and adjectives are marked for any combination
of number, definiteness, gender and case. Moreover,
they are affixed with prepositions [1], [19]. For
example, from the noun ተማሪ (tämari/student), the
following words are generated through inflection and
affixation: ተማሪዎች (tämariwoč/students), ተማሪው
(tämariw/ the student {masculine}/his student), ተማሪየ
(tämariyän/my student), ተማሪየን (tämariyän/my
student {objective case}), ተማሪሽ (tämariš/your
{feminine} student), ለተማሪ (lätämari/for student),
ከተማሪ (kätämari/ from student), etc. Similarly, we can
generate the following words from the adjective ፈጣን
(fäţan/fast): ፈጣኑ (fäţanu/fast, {definite} {masculine}
{singular}), ፈጣኖች (fäţanoč/fast {plural}), ፈጣኖቹ
(fäţanoču/fast {definite} {plural}), etc. Amharic verb
inflections and derivations are even more complex than
those of nouns and adjectives. Several verbs in surface
forms are derived from a single verbal stem, and several
stems in turn are derived from a single verbal root. For
example, from the verbal root ስብር (sbr/to break), we
can derive verbal stems such as säbr, säbär, sabr,
säbabr, täsäbabr, etc. From each of these verbal stems
we can derive many verbs in their surface forms. If we
take the stem säbär, the following verbs can be
derived: ሰበረ (säbärä/he took), ሰበረች (säbäräč/she
broke), ሰበርኩ (säbärku/I broke), ሰበርኩት
20
(alsäbärkutĭm/I broke [it/him]), አልሰበርኩም but are embedded in the word ይሰብረኛል
(alsäbärkum/I didn’t break), አልሰበረችም (yĭsäbräňal/[he/it] will break me). Moreover, both
(alsäbäräčĭm/she didn’t break) , አልሰበረም independent and hidden personal pronouns are subject
(alsäbäräm/he didn’t break), አልሰበረኝም to complex affixation processes in Amharic.
(alsäbäräňĭm/he didn’t break me), ተሰበረ
(täsäbärä/[it/he] was broken), ስለተሰበረ Amharic Anaphora Resolution
(sĭlätäsäbärä/as [it/he] was broken), ከተሰበረ System
(kätäsäbärä/ if [it/he] is broken), እስኪሰበር System Architecture
(ĭskisäbär/until [it/he] is broken), ሲሰበር (sĭsäbär/when
A complete anaphora resolution system is a very
[it/he] is broken), etc. complex process involving multidisciplinary concepts
Amharic verbs are marked for any combination of person, and requires different levels of linguistic analysis as
gender, number, case, tense/aspect, and mood resulting in
thousands of words from a single verbal root [1], [19]. As a
discussed in Section I. Such requirements hinder the
result, a single word may represent a complete sentence development of a complete anaphora resolution system
cosutructed with subject, verb and object. For example, for under-resourced languages like Amharic. Thus, the
ይሰብረኛል (yĭsäbräňal/[he/it] will break me) is a sentence proposed anaphora resolution system focuses on
where the verbal stem ሰብር (säbr/ will break) is marked for resolution of pronominal anaphoric terms, which in many
various grammatical functions as shown in Fig. 1. languages form the core of anaphora resolution systems.
Accordingly, the proposed system has five major
components: low-level knowledge extraction,
ይ ሰ ብ ረ ኛ ል
identification of independent anaphors, identification of
yĭ sä b rä ňa l hidden anaphors, identification of candidate antecedents
and anaphora resolution. In addition to the Amharic text
The verbal stem -ኧኛ- (-äňa-) to be processed, the system requires permanently stored
ሰብር list of Amharic personal pronouns, constraint rules and
Marker for the preference rules as inputs, and produces anaphors along
(säbr/ will break) objective case “me” with antecedent relations as an output. The architecture
ይ....ል/yĭ....l of the system is shown in Fig. 2. In the figure, dashed
lines represent temporary storages created during
Marker for the subject “he/it” runtime.
Fig. 1. Morphology of the word ይሰብረኛል (yĭsäbräňal). Low-Level Knowledge Extraction
Amharic Personal Pronouns Independent anaphors can be easily identified by
Personal pronouns in Amharic language are እኔ (ĭne/ I), searching for personal pronouns in the text whereas
hidden anaphors can be identified by analyzing the
እኛ (ĭňa/ we), አንተ (antä/ you [male, singular]), አንቺ morphology of verbs. On the other hand, nouns and head
(anči/ you [female, singular]), እናንተ (ĭnantä/ you nouns of noun phrases form antecedents. Thus, to
[gender neuter, plural]), እርስዎ (ĭrswo/ you [gender identify independent anaphors, hidden anaphors and
neuter, polite]), እርሱ /እሱ (ĭrsu/ĭsu/ he or it), እርሷ/እሷ candidate antecedents, the Amharic text should be
(ĭrswa/ĭswa/ she), እርሳቸው/እሳቸው (ĭrsačäw/ ĭsačäw/ processed with the aim of labeling the text with POS tags
he or she [polite]), እነርሱ/እነሱ (ĭnärsu/ĭnäsu/ they). In and chunks which are considered to be low-level
linguistic knowledge. POS tagging is a classification task
addition, possessive and objective forms could be with the goal of assigning word classes to the words in a
derived through prefixing and suffixing with የ- (yä) and text [3] and it helps identify antecedents and independent
-ን (n), respectively. For example, የእኔ (yäĭne/ my) and anaphors. Chunking is a task that consists of dividing a
እኔን (ĭnen/ me) are derived from እኔ (ĭne/ I) through text into non-overlapping syntactically correlated words
such affixation process. Amharic personal pronouns can and it helps to get noun phrases from which candidate
exist in sentences in two forms: independent and antecedents are identified. Furthermore, POS tagging and
hidden. Independent pronouns are those which appear chunking are used to identify verbs from which we
extract hidden personal pronouns. Because of the
independently in the text whereas hidden pronouns are
unavailability of a fully functional POS tagger for
embedded in other words. For example, in Fig. 1, the Amharic, we used a manually tagged Amharic text. POS
subjective pronoun እሱ (ĭsu/ he or it) and objective tagged Amharic text is further processed to get chunks in
pronoun እኔን (ĭnen/ me) do not appear independently the text. An Amharic chunker developed by Ibrahim and

21
Assabie [7] was used to chunk POS tagged Amharic
texts.

Amharic text Identification of

Candidate Antecedents Candidate antecedents

Low-Level Identification of Hidden Anaphors Anaphora Resolution

Knowledge Morphological analysis

Identification of verbs
Amharic POS tagging
Extraction
List of verbs Morphological properties
POS tagged text of anaphors and
Morphological analysis
antecedents
Amharic chunking
Application of constraint rules
List of morphemes
Chunked text
Extraction of hidden anaphors anaphora Yes

resolved?
No
Identification of
List of anaphors Application of preference rules
Independent Anaphors

Constraint rules

List of Amharic personal pronouns

Anaphors and antecedents
Preference rules relations

Fig. 2. Amharic anaphora resolution system architecture.

The examples below show the results of low-level ልጅቷ ትልቅ ወንድሟ እርሷ ክፍል ውስጥ
knowledge extraction process.
እንዲያስጠናት እናቷን ጠየቀቻት።
መስተዳድሩ ከፍተኛ ውጤት ላስመዘገቡ ተማሪዎች
ሽልማት ሰጠ። lĭjĭtwa tĭlĭq wendĭmwa ĭrswa kĭfĭl wusţ ĭndiyasţänat
ĭnatwan ţäyäqäčat።
mästädadĭru käfĭtäña wuţet lasmäzägäbu tämariwoč
šĭlĭmat säţä። The girl requested her mother so that her older
brother would tutor her in her room.
The administration gave awards to students who
scored high grade. ('ልጅቷ', 'N'), ('ትልቅ ADJ ወንድሟ N', 'NP'), ('እርሷ
PERPRO ክፍል N ውስጥ PREP', 'PP'), ('እንዲያስጠናት' ,
('መስተዳድሩ' , 'N'), ('ከፍተኛ ADJ ውጤት N', 'V'), ('እናቷን NPREP ጠየቀቻት V' , 'VP')
'NP'), ('ላስመዘገቡ', 'VPREP'), ('ተማሪዎች', 'N'),
('ሽልማት N ሰጠ V', 'VP')
Identification of Independent Anaphors
Personal pronouns in a given Amharic text are considered
to be independent anaphors. Thus, to identify independent
anaphors, we are searching for words tagged as personal

22
pronouns in a POS tagged Amharic text. However, it is to be
noted that Amharic personal pronouns are subject to various
affixation processes. For example, many words can be derived
through affixation processes from the personal pronoun እርሷ
(ĭrswa), some of which are: የእርሷ (yäĭrswa), ከእርሷ (käĭrswa),
በእርሷ (bäĭrswa), እርሷን (ĭrswan), የእርሷን (yäĭrswan),
እርሷንም (ĭrswanĭm), የእርሷንም (yäĭrswanĭm) , እንዯእርሷ
(ĭndäĭrswa), etc. Thus, identification of independent anaphors is
achieved by having a database of Amharic personal pronouns
(in their root forms) and matching them against the sub-
patterns of personal pronouns in the given POS tagged text.
Identified independent anaphors are stored in a temporary
storage which will be used later in the process of anaphora
resolution.
Identification of Hidden Anaphors
The unique complexity of Amharic anaphora
resolution lies in the identification of hidden anaphors.
As discussed in Section II.B, verbs are marked for
combinations of several grammatical functions such as
subject and object resulting in references to subjects
and objects embedded in the verbs. Consequently, it is
very common to construct Amharic sentences without
the explicit use of independent anaphors. For instance,
consider the following examples:
ካሳ ጠንካራ ነው። መቶ ኪሎ ይሸከማል። የብረት ዱላም
በእጁ ይሰብራል።
kasa ţänkara näw። mäto kilo yĭšäkämal። yäbĭrät
dulam bäĭju yĭsäbral።
Kasa is strong. [He] can carry a hundred kilogram.
[He] can also break an iron stick with his hand.
ካሳ ጠንካራ ነው። እሱ መቶ ኪሎ ይሸከማል። እሱ የብረት
ዱላም በእጁ ይሰብራል።
kasa ţänkara näw። ĭsu mäto kilo yĭšäkämal። ĭsu
yäbĭrät dulam bäĭju yĭsäbral።
Kasa is strong. [He] He can carry a hundred kilogram.
[He] He can also break an iron stick with his hand.
The verb ይሰብራል (yĭsäbral/[he] can break) is marked for
the subject እሱ (ĭsu/ he) and implicitly shows the presence of
the subject (hidden anaphor). The explicit use of እሱ (ĭsu/he)
as a subject results in redundancy of the subject as shown in
the second example. Therefore, the use of Amharic
independent anaphors is discouraged in such cases, and the
first example is more common and natural than the second.
These lingistic phenomena add complexity to the whole
process of anaphora resolution for Amharic text. Thus, a
successful identification of hidden anaphors is an important
step in Amharic anaphora resolution. These hidden anaphors
are identified from verbs in the chunked text by making use of
morphological analyzer that indicates grammatical functions
for which verbs are marked. Identification of hidden anaphors
becomes more complex when verbs are marked for more
number of grammatical functions. We used HornMorpho
morphological analyzer dveloped by Gasser [4] to extract such
information from verbs. For example, ይሰብራል (yĭsäbral/[he]
can break) is analyzed as “ይ (yĭ) + ሰብር (säbr) + ኣል (al)”
where “ይ (yĭ) ... ኣል (al)” would represent “he can” and
“ሰብር (säbr)” would be equivalent to “break”. Accordingly,
the hidden anaphor እሱ (ĭsu/ he) can be identified from the
verb ይሰብራል (yĭsäbral/[he] can break) though morphological
analysis. Identified hidden anaphors are stored in a temporary
storage along with independent anaphors.
Identification of Candidate Antecedents
Identification of candidate antecedents is a process
whereby a list of words is prepared from which the
correct antecedents referred by anaphors are selected.
All nouns and head nouns of noun phrases are used as
possible candidate antecedents. Thus, we used chunked
texts to identify nouns and head nouns in a given text.
Thus, Amharic chunker is used to find possible
antecedents which could be best selected as the
antecedents of the anaphors to be resolved. For
instance, let us take the chunked sentence:
('መስተዳድሩ' , 'N'), ('ከፍተኛ ADJ ውጤት N', 'NP'),
('ላስመዘገቡ', 'VPREP'), ('ተማሪዎች', 'N'), ('ሽልማት N ሰጠ
V', 'VP'). From the sentence, መስተዳድሩ
(mästädadĭru/the administra-tion), ውጤት (wuţet/
grade), ተማሪዎች (tämariwoč/ students) and ሽልማት
(šĭlĭmat/award) are nouns or head nouns of noun
phrases. As a result, they are candidate antecedents for
the anaphor (“he” or “it”) hidden inside the verb ሰጠ
(säţä/[he/it] gave).
Anaphora Resolution
Now that anaphors and candidate antecedents are identified,
the final step is to establish relevant relations between them.
This relation is built by applying a stored knowledge of
constraint and preference rules which are developed by taking
the inherent characteristics of Amharic language into
consideration. The constraint rules we applied in this work are
gender, number and person agreements where we use
morphological analyzer to extract the gender, number, and
person properties of nous and head nouns of noun phrases.
Constraint rules are applied both on anaphors and candidate
antecedents to select correctly related antecedents that agree
23
with the anaphors. The antecedent-anaphor relationship is built The administration gave awards to students who
and stored in a database if only one plausible antecedent is left scored high grade.
after the constraint rules are applied. If more than one
candidate antecedents vie for a single anaphora, then
preference rules are applied. Preference rules give more
preference to antecedents that satisfy the rule and give nothing In the example, the verb ሰጠ (säţä /[he] gave) has the hidden
or negative value to those that do not satisfy the rule. The personal pronoun እሱ (ĭsu/he). መስተዳድሩ (mästädadĭru/the
criteria to establish preference rules used in this work are administration), ውጤት (wuţet/ grade), ተማሪዎች (tämariwoč/
subject place, definiteness, recency, mention frequency, and students) and ሽልማት (šĭlĭmat/award) are nouns or head nouns
boost pronoun. Nouns at subject position of a sentence are of noun phrases which can be candidate antecedents. Gender,
more preferred than nouns not placed at subject positions. number and person information of the verb ሰጠ (säţä /[he]
Indefiniteness is unmarked in Amharic nouns, but definiteness gave) is male, singular and third person, respectively. On the
is always marked by a suffix -ኡ (-u) or -ው (w) as in በጉ other hand, gender, number and person information of
(bägu/the sheep) and በሬው (bärew/the ox), respectively. candidate antecedents is shown in Table 2.
Definite nouns are more preferred as relevant antecedents than
nouns which are not definite. On the other hand, nouns which Table 2. Gender, number and person information of candidate
are most recent to the anaphor are given more weight than antecedents.
others which are not recent. The antecedent mentioned Candidate antecedent Gender Number Person
repetitively is also given more priority. Boost pronouns are
pronouns used as antecedents for anaphors and the pronouns
themselves can be considered as possible candidates. The መስተዳድሩ [male] singular third
preference of one criterion over the other is determined through
values calculated using the probability distribution they have in ውጤት [male] singular third
Amharic language. The probability distribution is calculated by
statistically analyzing an Amharic text. Table 1 shows the ተማሪዎች neuter plural third
probability distribution of preference rules (with percentage
from 5). ሽልማት [male] singular third

Table 1. Values of preference rules for Amharic text.

Percent from Among the candidates, ተማሪዎች (tämariwoč/ students) will

Preference criteria be discarded due to the constraint on its number which is plural
5 as opposed to that of the hidden anaphor. The remaining three
candidates pass to the next step where preference rules are
Subject place + 2.88 applied. Table 3 shows the respective values (along with their
aggregate scores) that the remaining candidate antecedents
Definiteness + 0.94 receive from each preference criterion. From the three
candidate antecedents, the candidate having largest aggregate
Recency + 0.89 score is መስተዳድሩ (mästädadĭru/the administration). As a
result, it is selected as the antecedent being referred by the
Mention frequency + 0.02 personal pronoun እሱ (ĭsu/he) hidden inside verb ሰጠ (säţä
/[he] gave).
Boost pronoun + 0.12
Table 3. Preference values given to candidate antecedents.
Candidate Subject Definiteness Recency Mention Boost Aggregate
antecedent score
Each candidate antecedent receives a value from each place frequency pronoun
preference criterion. If a candidate antecedent fulfils a
preference criterion, it would receive the corresponding value መስተዳድሩ +2.88 +0.94 0 0 0 +3.82
for that criterion. Otherwise, it would receive zero value.
Finally, a candidate antecedent that has the highest aggregate ውጤት 0 0 0 0 0 0
score is selected as an antecedent for a given anaphor. For
example, let us take the following sentence.
ሽልማት 0 0 +0.89 0 0 +0.89

መስተዳድሩ ከፍተኛ ውጤት ላስመዘገቡ

ተማሪዎች ሽልማት ሰጠ።

mästädadĭru käfĭtäña wuţet lasmäzägäbu

tämariwoč šĭlĭmat säţä።

24
 Experiment
The Corpus
To evaluate the performance of the system, two sets of
Amharic text corpus were collected from various sources. The
first set of corpus is used to establish preference rules. A total
of 495 sentences were statistically analyzed to compute the
probability distribution of preference criteria. Another set of
corpus was used to test the performance of the system. We
used 311 sentences that were generated by the Amharic
chunker. The text was collected from Walta Information
Center and an Amharic grammar book [7]. From these
sentences, we identified a total of 315 verbs which contain
hidden personal pronouns. It was observed that the number of
independent anaphors in the sentences was very minimal. Thus,
we collected an additional text from the Amharic Bible where
we selected a total of 163 sentences having 110 independent
personal pronouns.
Test Results
We used 10-fold cross-validation technique to test the
performance of the system. The original sample is randomly
partitioned into 10 equal size subsamples and the cross-
validation process is then repeated 10 times. Accordingly, we
obtain 10 results from the folds which can be averaged to
produce a single estimation of the overall performance of the
system. The evaluation methods we used to test the
performance of the system are Success Rate (SR) and Critical
Success Rate (CSR) which are computed as follows.
Number of correctly resolved anaphors 
SR 
Number of all anapho rs
Number of correctly resolved anaphors (2)
CSR 
Number of anaphors with more than one antecedent
Equation 2 is used when an anaphor has more than one
antecedent after the application of gender, number and person
constraint rules. The overall performance of the proposed
system also depends on the performances of Amharic POS
tagger, chunker, and morphological analyzer. The accuracy of
the Amharic chunker is 93.75% [7] and the accuracy of the
morphological analyzer, using our tests, is 92.7%. With these
limitations, the overall performance of our proposed anaphora
resolution system is shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Test result for Amharic anaphora resolution system.
Success
Type of anaphors Critical success rate
rate
Independent 81.79% 76.07%
Hidden 70.91% 57.58%
Conclusion
Amharic is one of the most morphologically complex and
less-resourced languages. Despite the efforts being undertaken
to develop various Amharic NLP applications, only few usable
tools are publicly available at present. Researchers and
developers frequently mention that the morphological
complexity of the language is a feature that hinders the
development of natural language processing applications for
the language. Amharic anaphora resolution also suffers from
this problem since anaphoric terms are subject to affixation
processes and are also embedded in other words. In this work,
we tried to overcome this problem by POS tagging, chunking,
and analyzing the morphology of words. Due to unavailability
of high-level linguistic tools for the language, we follow
knowledge poor anaphora resolution approach that uses the
results of low-level linguistic analyses. With the limitations on
Amharic chunker and morphological analyzer we used as
components in the system, tests have shown that the proposed
Amharic anaphora resolution system yields promising results.
The performance of the system can be further enhanced by
improving the effectiveness of the chunking and morphological
analysis modules. Thus, future work is recommended to be
directed at improving the chunking and morphological analysis
components of the system. Moreover, the preference rules can
be refined better by statistically analyzing a large amount of
corpus.
References
[1] G. Amare. ዘመናዊ የአማርኛ ሰዋስው በቀላል አቀራረብ (Modern
Amharic Grammar in a Simple Approach), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2010.
[2] T. Deoskar. Techniques for Anaphora Resolution: A Survey,
Unpublished, Cornell University, USA, 2004.
[3] S. Fissaha. Part of Speech Tagging for Amharic using Conditional
Random Fields. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Computational
Approaches to Semitic Languages: 47–54,2005.
[4] M. Gasser. HornMorpho: a system for morphological processing of
Amharic, Oromo, and Tigrinya, In Proceedings of Conference on
Human Language Technology for Development, Alexandria, Egypt,
2011.
[5] H. Ho, K. Min and W. Yeap. Pronominal Anaphora Resolution using a
shallow meaning representation of sentences. In Proceedings of the 8th
Pacific Rim International Conference on AI: 862-871, 2004.
[6] G. Holen. Automatic Anaphora Resolution for Norwegian (ARN), PhD
Thesis, University of Oslo, 2006.
[7] A. Ibrahim and Y. Assabie. Hierarchical Amharic Base Phrase Chunking
Using HMM with Error Pruning, In Proceedings of the 6th Language &
Technology Conference, December 7-9, Poznan, Poland, 2013.
[8] M. Kabadjov. A Comprehensive Evaluation of Anaphora Resolution and
Discourse-new Classification. PhD Thesis, University of Essex, UK,
2007.
[9] D. Küçük. A knowledge-poor pronoun resolution system for Turkish.
PhD Thesis, Middle East Technical University, 2005.
[10] P. Lewis, F. Simons and D. Fennig. Ethnologue: Languages of the
World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2013.
[11] T. Liang and D. Wu. Automatic Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in
English Texts. Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language
Processing (9)(1): 21-40, 2004.
25
 Web Based Amharic Question Answering System for Factoid Questions Using
Machine Learning Approach
DesalegnAbebaw (ledessu@gmail.com), MulugetaLibsie (PhD) (mlibsie@yahoo.com)

Abstract Amharic documents from the web in preparing the

When users need for a certain fact and try requesting
search engines for it, they get back a bunch of addresses
and snippets which are „related‟ to their need and it is up
to the users to decide which address to choose expecting
that the requested fact could be found there. Opening the
address could present the user with lots of pages of
information and it is the user‟s duty to go through the
information and extract the actual fact. But given a
collection of documents, a Question Answering system
attempts to retrieve correct answers to questions posed in
natural language. Hence question answering relieves
users from the task of digging the information from
related pages.
Prior implementations of language processing tasks
typically involved the direct hand coding of large sets of
rules. Modern approaches to NLP are grounded in
Machine Learning (ML). This approach uses learning
algorithms often grounded in statistical inference to
automatically learn such rules through the analysis of
large corpora of typical real world examples as a
training set.
SeidMuhie‟s[2] TETEYEQ is a pioneer question
answering work designed to answer Amharic factoid
questions („Person‟, „Place‟, „Time‟, and „Quantity‟ type
questions) using rule based approach. We have designed
a system for answering the four kinds of Amharic
factoid questionsusing a machine learning approach by
employing the known machine learning based
classification algorithm, support vector machine (SVM).
By doing so, we attained an accuracy of 94.2% in
question classification which outperforms the rule based
question classification in TETEYEQ[2].
We have also integrated a web crawler by customizing
the open source JSpider crawler to automatically gather
search space. The downloaded Amharic documents are
then indexed by the open source tool, Lucene indexer, to
facilitate the document retrieval process. Hence, our
system has two major parts, the search space preparation
part (crawler and indexer) and the question answering
part. Besides, our system is designed to be a web based
system for interacting with the end users on the web.
By employing the machine learning algorithm in
question classification and adopting answer extraction
techniques used in TETEYEQ, we have achieved
77%overall system performance which is better than that
of TETEYEQ‟s.
In the absence of basic natural language processing
(NLP) tools like part of speech (POS) tagger and named
entity recognizer (NER) for the Amharic language, both
TETEYEQ and our system have achieved a considerable
performance which would be boosted up by the addition
of such NLP tools in the future.
Key Words: Amharic Factoid Question Answering,
SVM based question classification, Answer Extraction,
Web based Amharic Question Answering
1. Introduction
When users need for a certain fact and try requesting
search engines for it, they get back a bunch of addresses
and snippets which are „related‟ to their need and it is up
to the users to decide which address to choose expecting
that the requested fact could be found there. Opening the
address could present the user with lots of pages of
information and it is the user‟s duty to go through the
information and extract the actual fact. But given a
collection of documents, a Question Answering
systemattempts to retrieve correct answers to questions
posed in natural language. Hence question answering

26
relieves users from the task of digging the information
from related pages.
There are different types of questions like definition, list,
acronyms, true/false, and factoid types. Most of the
question answering systems have three major
components, question analysis, document (passage)
retrieval, and answer extraction.
An effort has been made to design a Question
Answering tool in many languages. The popular web
based Question Answering System for English Language
is available online [1].A similar effort has been made to
design an Amharic Question Answering System for
factoid questions by SeidMuhie[2]. This work was done
using a rule based approach to analyze natural language
questions.
2. Related Work
For languages like English, many question answering
systems are available which are designed in different
approaches. But in the case of Amharic, Seid Muhie‟s[2]
TETEYEQ is a pioneer work designed to answer
Amharic factoid questions. It aims to answer four kinds
of Amharic factoid questions namely the „Person‟,
„Place‟, „Time‟, and „Quantity‟ question types. It was
designed by employing a rule based approach in
question analysis component by manually writing rules
to classify questions into one of these four question
types resulting in an accuracy of classifying 86.9% of
the questionscorrectly. It was also using manually
collected Amharic documents as a search space and the
reported overall system performance was 72%.
Figure1shows a snapshot of TETEYEQ‟s interface
replying to the user‟s question
“የኢትዮጵያጠቅላይሚኒስትርማንይባላሉ ? ”. In this
research, a large number of Amharic corpuses
(approximately 15600 news articles) were collected from
the Web and Ethiopian newspapers. The corpuses need
to pass through a document pre-processing phase to
make them have a predetermined format. This pre-
processing could be done for documents already
collected and expected to be used for answering all the
natural language questions to be raised by users. This
could be suitable in designing domain specific question
answering systems having a predetermined
knowledgebase.
But this doesn‟t make sense when thinking about the
entire web as a knowledgebase for the question
answering system. Therefore, in our research, as we are
aiming to use the web as our knowledgebase, we don‟t
need to undertake a pre-processing task.
The preprocessed documents were then indexed using
the Lucene indexer after being analyzed by the Amharic
analyzer (for tokenizing, removing stop words, character
normalization, and stemming purposes)
User generated questions are received by the system and
a rule based question type identification carried out to
determine what type of question the user is asking and
what type of answer is being expected from that
Figure 1 a snapshot of TETEYEQ’s interface
question.
But both the question type and expected answer types
identification was done using the help of manually
crafted regular expressions (rules) which are not easy to
develop and are most of the time rigid to entertain other
types of questions if a need arises, in the future, for the
system to deal with other question types other than the
four factoid types („person‟, „time‟, „place‟, and
„quantity‟).
3. Design
The web based Amharic question answering system, as
its Figure
name indicates, is a natural
1 : TETEYEQ's interfacelanguage question
answering system expected to respond to end users‟
Amharic factoid questions posed to the system like the
way end users are querying human beings in natural
language questions.
27
Therefore, in the first place, the system needs to
understand what the end user is meant to look for.
Analyzing the users‟ request by itself is not enough. The
request (question) needs to be formulated into an
equivalent query that can be understood by the system in
retrieving documents related to what is being asked.
Passage retrieval is an intermediate process in some question
answering systems between document retrieval and answer
extraction. Potential passages are selected from the returned
documents so that the answer extraction effort will be
minimized. But it doesn‟t always guarantee to get a better
result than extracting answers directly from retrieved
documents. This is basically dependent on the distribution of
answer terms in the document. If it is believed that answer
terms are commonly found in a single passage, the passage
retrieval becomes efficient. But for open ended factoid
questions, the answer terms might be dispersed over the entire
document. Hence, dealing with passage retrieval doesn‟t work
in our case [5].
Knowing the key words to retrieve documents from the
document repository is the next step. But the document
repository‟s richness has the major effect in the likelihood of
finding the documents in the repository. The repository can be
a small (or constant) collection of documents collected from
the web or offline materials. This results in two situations:
First, if a matching document is not found in the repository,
given a particular set of query terms, it can always be
determined that the same response will be generated in the
future for similar queries. Second, the repository size has a
direct relationship in the likelihood of finding related
documents for a given query; the larger the number of
documents in the repository, the higher the likelihood of
finding related documents for a given query term(s)
Figure 2 shows the entire architecture of the web based
Amharic question answering system. The detail explanation
about each component in the system comes next.

Question
The Web

Query Question Training the

Web Crawling Generation Classification Classifier

Question Analysis
Documents
Crawled
DocumentsDire
ctory
Classifier
Models Models
Script
Identification Document
Retrieval
Amharic
documents
Directory Candidate
Majority Amharic
Content Documents Documents

Documents
Expected
Lucene Answer
Indexing Type

Query

Index
Lucene Directory
Index File Candidate
Documents
Answer Extraction
28

Answers

Answer

3.1. Question Analysis
This is the first component of the system which directly
interacts with the end user. When the user poses
Amharic factoid question to the system, the question
analysis component takes in the user query and passes it
to its sub components. The two major sub components
are automatic question classification, and query
generation.
3.1.1 Automatic Question Classification
One of the major differences of our system with that of
SeidMuhie‟s[2] is the question classification approach.
In [2], a serious of hand-crafted rules were used to
classify user‟s questions into the factoid question types
of „person‟, „time‟, „place‟, and „quantity‟. But, in our
case, the classification is done using a statistical
approach by getting use of the very known and efficient
text classification algorithm called the Support Vector
Machine (SVM). Support Vector Machines were
initially designed for binary classification (classification
into one of the two classes). How to use it in multi-class
classification is still a research issue. Different
approaches have been proposed on how to use the binary
classifier for multi-class classification tasks. A “one-
against-one” way of combining binary classifiers is a
more suitable way for practical use [3].
Hence, in our classification, we have generated a total of
six classification models in the “one-against-one”
terminology (i.e. n(n-1)/2 models where n is the number
of classes; n=4 in our case).
SVM, as a statistical approach, needs large amount of
training data so as to train the machine so that it would
make accurate classifications for the unseen test data.
In this case, we have prepared 1200 questions from the
four classes of factoid questions („person‟, „time‟,
„place‟, and „quantity‟) for training the classifier.
The Windows version of the SVM classifier,
SVM_Light, developed by Thorsten Joachims, is used
for our question classification task. It is freely available
for research purpose and can be smoothly integrated
with our system.
3.1.2 Query Generation
This is the component which transforms the natural
language question into the one suitable for searching the
terms in the question from the Lucene index file. The
generated query hence is the sole input to the
forthcoming document retrieval component.
During the generation phase the user question goes
through the language analysis, tokenization, short words
expansion, stop words removal, and stemming phases.
The generated query is then passed to the document
retrieval component for searching documents related to
the query generated and believed to contain candidate
answers.
3.2.Document Retrieval
The document retrieval component is responsible for
fetching documents which are related to the generated
query in the previous component. The quality of this
component has a direct relationship with the overall
Question Answering System‟s performance [4].
Hits returned from the document retrieval component are
not guaranteed to hold candidate answers for the user
question. Because, the Lucene‟s index searching only
cares about the match (similarity) between query terms
and indexed documents. But it is likely that a top ranked
document, a document containing maximum number of
query terms when compared to other documents, might
not contain candidate answers in it.
Therefore, the ranked list of relevant documents returned
from the Lucene‟s search method are subjected to further
inspection by the subsequent component, answer
extraction component to find the ranked list of candidate
answers which are to be returned to the user.
3.3. Answer Extraction
This is a fundamental component that a question
answering system differs from the ordinary search
engines. Its main objective is to extract terms, which are
29
believed to be answers to the question posed by the user, It is not a surprise that after all these sequential
from the hits returned by the Lucene‟s index searcher. interaction of the question answering components one
after the other, the final result may end up in returning
Different factoid question answering systems employ
“no answer” to the user. This happens because of the
different methods of extracting an answer from
absence of relevant documents in the repository,because
candidate documents or passages [6]. The answer
the query terms are found very dispersed in „relevant‟
extraction methods based on pattern matching form the
documents, or absence of candidate answer terms in the
most simple and commonly used group of answer
„relevant‟ documents.
extraction methods. The most complex part of the
methods lies in the way the patterns are created or
generated, whereas the patterns themselves are simple. 1. Performance Evaluation
Answer extraction methods based on pattern matching While evaluating the performance of the question
follow the tradition of information extraction methods. classification, we have followed a 10-fold cross
validation technique. In this technique, ten separate
Answer extraction patterns (AEPs) may consist of
experiments are done by reserving one tenth of the data
several types of units, such as punctuation marks,
(120 questions) for testing and using the rest of the data
capitalization patterns, plain words, part-of-speech

(POS) tags, Figure 3: A snapshot

tags describing of the
syntactic system named
function, while answering
entities (NEs) and temporal and numeric expressions.
One of the other methods is the very simple proximity
based method. It is based on the proximity between the
query terms and candidate answer terms. These
candidate answer terms are identified from the
documents based on some pattern matching technique.
In our system, we follow the pattern matching approach
together with the proximity method.
Finally, the list of likely answers will be returned back to
the user as a reply to the question posed at the very first
step.
at the firstfor
(1080 questions) rank.
training the classifier in each
experiment. We have used 6 classifier models in a single
experiment, resulting in a total of 60 models in the ten
experiments.
By supplying 30 test questions from each class, we have
recorded the performance of the classifier in each
experiment and then took the average of the ten
experiments to report the actual performance of the
question classifier in each of the four question types.
From this, we can say that we have acquired a
classification performance from the SVM classifier
giving 94.2% accuracy on average.

30
We have also performed the 10-fold cross validation to
check the performance of SeidMuhie‟s [4] rule based
question classifier by employing the test questions we
used to test our classifier. On average, the rule based
question classifier has classified 86.9% of the
questionscorrectly.
Besides the advantages of employing machine learning
based classifier over the rule based one, we observed
that the classification performance of the rule based
classifier is less than that of the SVM based classifier.
2. Conclusion
The web based Amharic factoid question answering
system has two major parts, the search engine part and
the question answering part.
As the corpus used is gathered from Amharic web sites,
we used a crawler to download pages from these sites.
Then, the downloaded pages will go through an
identification phase to filter out non-Amharic content
pages from our search space. This is the language
identification phase. The Amharic documents are then
indexed in a way to facilitate information retrieval later
in the system. When the search space is ready, then the
question answering part will start playing its role in
serving the users.
The question answering part has three main components,
namely, question analysis, document retrieval and
answer extraction.
For natural language processing applications such as
question answering, the importance of other fundamental
language processing modules like part of speech tagger
(POS), named entity recognizer (NER), and stemmer is
unquestionable. With the absence of these such modules
in Amharic language, SeidMuhie[2] has designed the
first Amharic factoid question answering system using a
rule based approach employed in the question analysis
component resulting in 89% of correct question type
identification; as is reported in [2]. The system had also
a performance of 97% in retrieving related documents.
Using a gazetteer in place of the named entity recognizer
and a regular expression, the researcher has reported a
72% overall system performance in correctly answering
user questions.
This work of ours aims to apply a machine learning
approach to the question analysis component hoping to
improve precision of the question classification task in
question analysis, whose accuracy impacts the accuracy
of the entire system.
With application of a known machine learning based
classification algorithm, support vector machine (SVM),
we attained an accuracy of 94.2% in question
classification.
Besides, we tried to incorporate a web crawler in our
system to help automatically gather web documents and
prepare a search space. With the integration of the
JSpider based web crawler, we are able to download
Amharic content pages from known Amharic news sites
and keeping the crawling process active while
periodically running the language identification and
indexing processes would enrich our search space
resulting in the likelihood of answering Amharic factoid
questions.
The top 5 relevant documents are used in our system.
Therefore, among the top hits returned by the document
retrieval component, the top 5 are believed to contain
much of the query terms and have potential to contain
the correct answer.
Extracting correct answers, given relevant documents
with the potential to contain correct answers, requires
extracting candidate answer terms from documents and
picking up one best answer among the candidates which
is closer to the query terms in the document than other
candidate answer terms. Our system‟s precision in
extracting candidate answer terms from relevant
documents is 62.3% on average for the four question
types. This is mainly due to the absence of part of speech
tagger and named entity recognizer which could have
helped a lot for identifying the part of speech where a
term is used in a sentence and named entities found in
the document. But, the selection of best answer out of
the candidate answer terms is done by computing the
character distance between candidate answers and query
terms in the document. In this regard, our system is able
to pick out 77% of answers correctly.
31
 3. References

[1] http://start.csail.mit.edu/ - START (SynTactic Analysis

using Reversible Transformations) – Last accessed on
Sept 29, 2011.

[2]SeidMuhie, 2009, Automatic Amharic Question Answering

for Factoid Question Types, Master‟s Thesis, Addis
Ababa University, Unpublished.

[3]Chih-Wei Hsu and Chih-Jen Lin, A Comparison of

Methods for Multi-Class Support Vector Machines,
Department of Computer Science and Information
Engineering, National Taiwan University.

[4]Kevyn Collins Thompson, Jamie Callan, Egidio Terra, and

Charles L.A. Clarke, The Effect of Document Retrieval
Quality on Factoid Question Answering Performance,
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
University, and University of Waterloo, Canada, ACM,
July 25–29, 2004.

[5] ChristofMonz, From Document Retrieval to Question

Answering, ILLC Dissertation Series DS-2003-4,
Institute for Logic, Language and
Computation,Universiteit van Amsterdam, 11
December, 2003.

[6] LiliAunimo, Methods for Answer Extraction in Textual

Question Answering, Series of Publications AReport A-2007-
3, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki,
Finland, 2007.

32
 A Mathematical Algorithm for Robust Color
Retinal Image Analysis - a preliminary study
Daniel Moges, Birhanu Assefa, and Dawit Assefa*
Center of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Bioinformatics
Addis Ababa Institute of Technology, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
* dawit.assefa@aau.edu.et
Abstract— This study presents a novel
mathematical scheme for analysis of color retinal
images acquired through digital fundus cameras
from patients treated for diabetic retinopathy. The
proposed scheme uses a holistic representation of the
color images in the three (trinion) space and applies
trinion based Fourier transforms to extract useful
imaging features for the purpose of classification and
segmentation of retinal images. A suitable color space
transformation and a way of extracting robust higher
order features are included in the method. The
scheme has been applied in analyzing images
acquired from standard retinal image databases and
results were very promising showing its suitability to
complement the screening of diabetic retinopathy
and its potential usefulness to ophthalmologists in
their daily practices.
Index Terms— Diabetic Retinopathy, Optic Disk,
Hard Exudates, Soft Exudates, Glaucoma, Color
Image Processing, Quaternion, Trinion.
I. Introduction
Diabetic retinopathy (DR), glaucoma, age-related
macular degeneration (AMD), and cataract are the
leading causes of blindness and visual impairment in
human eye. Cataract affects the front part of the eye
while the remaining three affect the retina and/or optic
nerve head at the back of the eye. Cataract is usually
noticed by the patient early enough for adequate
treatment while the early forms of DR, glaucoma and
AMD are usually not noticed by the patient, causing
substantial damage unless diagnosed early [1].
DR is a complication in the retina due to diabetics
causing abnormalities in the retina, and in the worst case,
blindness. Its characteristic features are Microaneurysms
(MA), Hemorrhages (H), Hard exudates (HE), and Soft
exudates (SE). The DR typically begins as small changes
in the retinal capillaries. The first detectable
abnormalities, the MA, are discrete localized distension
of the weakened capillary walls and are presented as
small, circular red dots on the retina. The MA cause intra
retinal hemorrhage when it is ruptured. Hemorrhages
appear either as red dots or flame-shaped. The disease
severity is classified as mild non-proliferative DR. HEs
are caused by proteins and lipids leaking from the blood
into the retina via damaged blood vessels and they appear
in retinal images as yellow white areas and sometimes in
a ring-like structure around leaking capillaries. This state
of the retinopathy is called moderate non-proliferative
DR. When the severity of DR advances the blood vessels
become obstructed causing microinfarcts in the retina
(the SE) which appear as pale yellow area. When
significant number of SEs, intraretinal hemorrhages or
intraretinal micro vascular abnormalities are encountered
the state of the retinopathy is defined as severe non
proliferative DR, which can quickly turn into
proliferative DR when extensive lack of oxygen causes
the development of new fragile vessels
(neovascularization) which is a serious eye sight
threatening state [2]. Glaucoma is an optic neuropathy,
involving gradual damage to the retinal ganglion cells
and their axons that lead into the optic nerve and further
into the visual areas of the brain. Glaucoma causes the
optic disk (OD) to have sharply denned borders and a
shallow physiological cup [1]. The OD is pale red with a
yellowish tint in the center of the retina and is the spot
where the optic nerve and blood vessels enter the eye.
In clinical ophthalmology, examination of the optic
fundus enables early detection and diagnosis of eye
diseases due to DR, AMD and glaucoma. Various
ophthalmoscope techniques such as digital and stereo
fundus photography, hyper spectral imaging, scanning
laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO), fluorescein angiography,
and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are used for
diagnosis and management of eye diseases [2]. However,
because of its simplicity, fundus camera is used most
often. It allows to view the fundus and the structures
leading to it by 2D representation of the 3D retinal semi-
transparent tissues. It is mostly used to detect and
33
evaluate symptoms of retinal detachment or eye diseases
due to DR and monitor their change over time which is
needed due to the progressive nature of the disease. The
growing incidence of diabetes increases the number of
images that need to be reviewed by ophthalmologists,
and the high cost of examination and lack of specialists
hinder broad screening and thereby preventing many
patients from receiving effective treatment. This calls for
the development of automatic image processing methods.
Thus the success of the mass screening depends not only
on accurate fundus image capture but also on the
accuracy and reliability of the image processing
algorithms in detecting abnormalities.
Automated computer aided detection of retinal lesions
associated with DR offers many potential benefits. In a
screening setting, it allows the examination of large
number of images in less time and more objectively than
traditional observer driven techniques. In a clinical
setting, it can be an important diagnostic aid by reducing
the workload of trained graders and other costs. The
current study focuses specially on exudates (EXs)
detection and their differentiation from other bright areas,
specifically cotton wools (CWs) and the OD which has
similar features in color and brightness with HEs. As
EXs are among common early clinical signs of DR, their
detection would be an asset to the mass screening tasks
and could serve as a first step towards a complete
monitoring and grading of the disease.
Generally, most attempts in fundus color image
processing focus on analyzing each separate color
components serially and combining the outputs from the
different channels. However, such a serial method masks
any existing inter-correlations between the color channels
and the associated computational cost is often high. In
this regard, a more holistic representation and analysis
approach should have tremendous advantages. Recent
application of higher dimensional algebra in color image
analysis uses vectorial representations of the three color
components in quaternion and trinion spaces and the
respective integral transforms permit the analysis as one
entity/object keeping the inter correlation information [5,
6]. Based on such a vectorial principle, a holistic,
automated, and unsupervised image processing scheme is
suggested in the current work to extract robust and
relevant textural features for major abnormality markers
in fundus images. The efficacy of image based higher
order features in enhancing major abnormality markers
and their effectiveness in attenuating intra and inter
image variations due to unwanted artifacts is thoroughly
investigated.
II. image analysis of fundus images
Most image analysis techniques for finding abnormalities
in fundus images are comprised of three major stages:
preprocessing, candidate abnormality finding and
classification/segmentation as briefly reviewed below.
A. Overview of preprocessing methods
Patient movement, poor focus, reflections, inadequate
illumination and the like can cause images to be of such
poor quality as to interfere with analysis and impede
human grading. Different preprocessing methods have
been suggested in the literature to overcome these
problems. Image normalization techniques have been
used to reduce the effect of image variations between
subjects by using histogram marching against a reference
image [4, 10, 11]. However those histogram marching
techniques may also lead to a loss of important
information in the original image (might suppress less
bright HEs for instance). Others used non uniform
background illumination correction using mean/median
filters [10]. In other studies images were divided into non
overlapping rectangular regions and mean and standard
deviation of intensities over the windows were used to
estimate the background [9, 11]. Global and local
contrast enhancement techniques such as contrast limited
adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) [12] and ways
of background noise suppression and mask estimation
have also been proposed.
Selection of best color space that have maximum
interclass separability for abnormality types is also a
major preprocessing task. For example, some methods
use only the green channel [8] and others use the
intensity component [4] of the original fundus images to
carry out their analysis. The LUV color space [8] and a
combination of green (from RGB), lightness (from
LUV), and magenta (from CMYK) space [3] have also
been used.
B. Image classification and segmentation
Accurate segmentation of fundus images provides a
better source of information for studying the various
ocular morphologies which is helpful to improve patient
diagnosis, prognosis, treatment planning, and monitoring.
However, manual segmentation is often a time-
consuming and subjective process. Additional challenge
is the fact that the retinal images acquired using fundus
cameras are prone to various artifacts such as noise, poor
image contrast, presence of anatomical structures with
highly correlated pixels with that of lesion, illumination
variability, color variation of similar subjects due to
difference in background, size and shape variation of
lesions, and eye movement during image acquisition.
Various methods have been suggested in the literature for
automatic segmentation of pathological and anatomical
structures of color retinal images. Due to retinal
pigmentation and the acquisition process, the retinal
images vary largely in luminosity and contrast, making it
harder to distinguish retinal features and lesions in some
34
areas thus hindering the automatic segmentation of
abnormalities. Some researchers attempted to detect EXs
based on their luminosity by simple tresholding [3]. The
wide variability among images makes the method
dependent on user intervention to select appropriate
thresholds. In addition, since the color and brightness
attributes of the OD are similar to that of the HE, such a
method may detect large number of false positives. A
similar approach was suggested where a combination of
global and local thresholds were applied to segment EXs
[3]. Another scheme creates a model of the retina to
automatically identify the presence of lesions in the
macular region [8]. Edge and brightness information
were also combined to identify EXs and detect the
severity of DR [9]. An automated statistical classifier has
also been used together with Fisher's linear discriminant
analysis (LDA) to segment EXs [10]. The limitation with
the approach was that it uses the isolated EXs color to
characterize yellowish regions, which cannot represent
the color of all the EXs found in the images due to their
diversity in brightness. Other methods include mixture
models with edge detection based post processing [4],
mathematical morphology operations [7], radial basis
function network [13], support vector machine (SVM)
[14], Neural networks (NN) [15], Bayesian classifiers, a
combined Fuzzy C-means clustering with SVM [12], and
atlas based approaches [6].
An efficient detection of OD in color retinal images is
also a significant task in an automated retinal image
analysis [17]. The position of OD can be used as a
reference length for measuring distances in retinal
images, especially for the location of the macula. Using
features of the fovea and their geometric relations with
other retinal structures, a method for the fovea
localization was proposed [4]. Grading of HEs was
performed using a polar coordinate system centered at
the fovea.
Automated segmentation of blood vessels is proved
useful in various clinical applications such as in vessel
diameter measurement to diagnose hypertension and
cardiovascular diseases and computer-assisted laser
surgery [18, 19, 20]. However, blood vessel segmentation
involves a huge challenge as images have various
artifacts which affect retinal background texture and the
vessels structure. Furthermore the blood vessels
particular features make them complex structures to
detect as the color of vascular structures is not constant
even along the same vessel. Their complex tree-like
geometry includes bifurcations and overlaps that may
mix up the detection system.
Various methods have been developed in the literature
for automatic blood vessel segmentation. For example,
spatially localized feature vectors were used utilizing
properties of scale and orientation selective Gabor filters
[18]. The extracted features were then classified using
generative Gaussian mixture model and discriminative
SVM classifiers. An active contour has been used based
on Zhang's method to extract vessel networks from color
retina images [21]. This analysis facilitates calculation of
arterial index which is required to diagnose certain
retinopathies. Other methods include a hybrid method
comprised of Gabor filters and entropic tresholding based
on gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) [20], vessel
enhancement technique comprised of Wavelet transform,
curvature estimation, matched filtering, and Fast
Marching (FM) [19].
Unlike most of the above mentioned approaches, which
rely on extraction of abnormalities in fundus images
based on features observed on a single color channel, a
scheme that combines three representative channels to
form novel features has also been suggested [3]. Based
on the multichannel features, the scheme employs
boosted soft segmentation (BSS) algorithm to obtain a
confidence map and then applies a background
subtraction method to get the coarse segmentation result.
The selected three channels were green (from RGB),
luminosity (from LUV), and magenta (from CMYK).
The method was applied only for detection of HEs and
the challenge of selecting the effective channels that best
suit the BSS algorithm are some of the limitations. To
circumvent this problem, a more holistic mathematical
approach making use of vectorial representations of the
retinal color images and a robust feature extraction
scheme based on local Fourier transforms computed in
higher dimensional spaces is proposed in the current
study.
III. materials and methods
A. Data sets
Five publicly available standard color fundus image data
sets have been used in the current work: DIARETDB0
(130 images, 10 normal and 120 contain mild
nonproliferative DR), DIARETDB1 (89 images, 5 normal
and 84 contain non-proliferative DR), High-Resolution
Fundus (HRF) Image Database (15 normal, 15 patients
with DR, and 15 glaucomatous patients), STARE (400
images), DRIVE (40 images). Images were 24 bit RGB
and were captured with varying settings (flash intensity,
shutter speed, aperture, gain). The images contain a
varying amount of imaging noise, but the optical
aberrations (dispersion, transverse and lateral chromatic,
spherical, field curvature, coma, astigmatism, distortion)
and photometric accuracy (color or intensity) were the
same. Therefore, the system induced photometric
variance over the visual appearance of the different
retinopathy findings can be considered small. The data
correspond to a good practical situation where the images
are comparable and can be used to evaluate the general
performance of diagnostic methods. All image sets came
35
accompanied by annotations carried out by experts and
those are used as gold standards in our study.
B. Color space selection
In the current work, a set of color spaces including RGB,
HSV, Lab, luv, CMYK, and LcrYcrR were tested and
compared for their robustness to extract meaningful
features. Based on previous research results [3], two
color spaces that have enhanced contrast and uniformity
for EXs and other retinal structures were selected for
further analysis. These were HSV (hue, saturation, value)
and GLM' (G component from RGB, L component from
Lab, and Inverse Magenta component from CMYK color
spaces). The HSV color space was selected since it has
similarity with human color perception and it is less
affected by inter and intra image variations due to
artifacts. The GLM' color space was chosen based on the
scatter matrix result of maximum interclass separability
[3]. A holistic image processing is applied that doesn't
require separation of color bands in both cases.
C. Holistic image processing in the trinion space
We are interested in robust texture feature based analysis
of color retinal images for use in effective classification
and segmentation. Visual analysis of textures is often a
difficult task especially in medical images where, in
general, the texture patterns may be very subtle and their
assessment very subjective. Quantitative texture analysis
attempts to provide objective metrics and determines
neighborhoods around pixels (texture elements) for
which the voxel intensities and spatial relationship
between them is used to extract certain quantitative
features that characterize the texture of this
neighborhood. Statistical approaches are widely
employed in texture recognition and description of
images [22]. Such methods include, for example,
measurement of local image variations to help in
contrasting image elements, calculation of auto
correlation functions based on spatial frequencies,
calculation of correlations to measure image linearity and
the like.
The traditional way of analyzing color images through
separating the monochromatic components misses out the
inter-correlation information that is embedded among the
monochromes. The task can be accomplished more
effectively and efficiently by employing more holistic
techniques. In that regard, methods that rely on vectorial
representation of color images have recently been
proposed and have shown very great promises. One such
successful approach uses quaternions for efficient
representation of color images and quaternion based
integral transforms to effectively analyze color images as
a whole by treating the color voxels as vectors [5, 6]. A
quaternion is defined with one real and three imaginary
components. Quaternions have been used to represent
three component color images by setting one of the
components to zero. However, most color images,
including our fundus camera images, have three
components and the extra fourth dimension in
quaternions creates redundancy in representing such
images with additional computational cost. Color images
can be best represented using the three component
trinions [5, 6].
A trinion t is defined as:
t  a  ib  jc
where a , b , and c are real numbers, and i , j are
operators satisfying the following rules:
i 2  j , ij  ji  1 , j 2  i .
Any trinion t  a  ib  jc can be written in the form
t  t (cos( )   sin( )) where t  a 2  b 2  c 2 ,
  V (t ) V (t ) , and   tan 1 ( V (t ) S (t )) ,
0     are the amplitude, eigen axis, and eigen angle
(phase) respectively, where S and V are the real and
vector parts of t . When t  1 , t is a unit trinion, and
when a  0 it is a pure trinion. More interesting
properties of trinions are discussed in the literature [6].
Two working definitions for the trinion Fourier transform
(TFT) have been suggested [6]. The TFT of type I and its
inverse (ITFT) are given by:
T (u, v) 
 
  h( x, y)cos(2 (ux  vy))  
  
1 sin(2 (ux  vy)) dxdy
h ( x, y ) 
 
  T (u, v)cos(2 (ux  vy))  
  
2 sin(2 (ux  vy))dudv
where h( x, y) is a trinion valued image function, 1 is a
36
Figure 2: OD localization results: original color fundus images (1st & 2nd) and feature
maps (3rd & 4th) showing compact signatures for the OD. The first image was a normal
case while the second one was a Glaucoma case.
unit, pure trinion, and  2 is a trinion such that
1  2  1. The choice of 1 and  2 is arbitrary. In our
study we used 1  (i  j ) 2 and
 2  (1  i  j ) 2 . There exists a type II TFT in the
literature [6]. However, many operations of interest
including convolutions and correlations are shown to be
easier using the type I TFT than type II TFT [6], and
hence the former has been adopted in the current study.
As a next step, the converted RGB color retinal image is
mapped to a trinion as h( x, y)  H  iS  jV (in the
HSV color space) or as h( x, y)  G  iL  jM ' (in the
GLM' color space). It has already been shown previously
that the order of the mapping to a trinion doesn't affect
the image analysis [6]. Spatially localized analysis in the
selected color space was then performed by computing
the TFT over a translating window of size 3x3. Note that
after discretization, the TFT was computed using the fast
Fourier transform.
Higher order 'Haralick' texture features [22] were
extracted from TFT transformed image matrix computed
over the translating window. Before computing these
features Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was
applied for feature dimension reduction and each value of
the resulting 3x3 matrix was normalized between 0 and 1
and these are the probability density functions used to
compute the texture features. The computed feature is
assigned to the central voxel value in that window.
37
Figure 3:
HE detection results: original images with moderate nonproliferative DR (1st &
2nd) and the respective signature maps generated using the proposed scheme (3rd &
4th). White lines are the ground truth that denote HEs.

Several Haralick second order features were
computed including Sum-mean, Variance, Energy,
Homogeneity, Contrast, Entropy, Cluster shade, and
Cluster prominence. These features were used to
generate the final signature maps, which allow to
differentiate between areas corresponding to HE, H,
OD, and other regions that have clinical significance
related to DR. The performance of signature maps
generated using different features was compared
accordingly through qualitative comparison of the
signature maps against the available ground truths.
I. Results and discussion
Signature maps computed from cluster prominence on
the GLM' color space showed improved results over
the other features. In Fig. (1), results are presented to
demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme in
OD localization. In both the normal as well as the
Glaucoma cases, very compact signatures maps were
generated for the ODs (cyan color) well distinct from
the background.

38
Figure (2) presents computed feature maps for
representative fundus images acquired from two
patients treated for moderate nonproliferative DR. In
both cases HEs (white bluish) were correctly identified
by the proposed scheme. The ODs (cyan color) were
also correctly detected as well.
Effective segmentation of HE and OD can be done by
using iterative tresholding applied on the color
signature maps. Our experiments showed that, for
images taken under normal illumination conditions,
segmentation of HE can easily be done by applying
thresholding on the third channel of the signature map.
Similarly OD segmentation can be done by using
tresholding on the second channel. Since blood vessels
appear as dark red color with sharp edges on the
signature maps, it can be segmented by applying edge
operators on the first channel. However, instead of
applying such a simple tresholding in each color
channel, a holistic method that applies a vectorial
scheme can be sought for a more effective
segmentation.
Generally, there is a good agreement between the
signature maps generated and the available ground
truth, while quantitative performance evaluation of the
proposed scheme is still a work in progress. However,
there are still rooms for improvement particularly
regarding the application of the proposed scheme on
images captured under very poor illumination and
higher noise conditions. One solution can be excluding
the fundus areas with poor luminance accompanied by
better noise suppression mechanisms before computing
the features.
II. conclusion and future work
In the current study automated signature maps
generated based on robust texture features computed in
higher order Fourier spaces were tested for their
potential in OD localization and detection of HEs and
other abnormalities in fundus retinal images.
Preliminary results showed that the texture signature
maps computed from cluster prominence feature in
particular were able to correctly classify the structures.
The same feature showed good results in detecting the
optic cup and the major vertically emerging blood
vessels, which are essential for glaucoma detection.
Quantitative analysis of the results is still ongoing.
Such an unsupervised image analysis technique is
helpful for mass screening and monitoring of diseases
due to DR and glaucoma. It awaits further investigation
to discover more clinical implications of the outcomes
from this study.
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40
 Automatic Recognition of Ethiopian License Plates
Seble Nigussie
Department of Computer Science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
seble.nigussie@aau.edu.et
Abstract—This paper presents an automatic recognition
system for Ethiopian license plates. The proposed system has
three major components: plate detection, character
segmentation and character recognition. We used Gabor filters
for plate detection, connected component analysis for
character segmentation, and correlation based template
matching method for character recognition. In addition to the
correlation value, the recognition process is supported by color
analysis techniques and location information of characters. To
test the performance of the system, a dataset of 350 car images
of RGB color format were collected from moving cars under
different angle, distance, motion and illumination conditions.
Test results on the dataset showed plate detection rate of
88.9%, character segmentation accuracy of 83.9% among
detected plates, and character recognition rate of 84.7%
among correctly segmented characters. We have also achieved
an overall plate recognition rate of 63.1%, and the whole
recognition processes takes 2-5 seconds depending on whether
post processing operations are needed or not.
Keywords— Intelligent Transport System; License Plate
Recognition; Ethiopian License Plate; Character Segmentation
Introduction
With the ever-increasing auto population, the
transportation system has been struggling to serve
users efficiently. In order to solve this problem, many
countries in the world still depend on building more
and more road infrastructures to reduce traffic stress.
But, for different reasons this solution is still not
capable enough to solve the existing problem. As a
result, various Intelligent Transportation Systems
(ITS) emerge as viable solution to the problem of
managing vehicles [1], [2]. ITSs apply technologies of
information processing and communication on
transport infrastructures to improve the transportation
outcome. In these days, numerous intelligent
transportation systems are being used by users in
various applications. One of these systems is License
Plate Recognition (LPR). LPR, also known as Car
Plate Recognition (CPR), is one of the most important
and popular elements of ITS. LPR is a mass
Yaregal Assabie
Department of Computer Science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
yaregal.assabie@aau.edu.et
surveillance system that captures images of vehicles
and recognizes their license numbers [3]. The main
objective of LPR
systems is to detect and recognize license plates of
vehicles from their images, and present the identified
information about the plate to machines in a way that
further applications can understand it. Some of these
applications, where LPR systems are gaining
popularity include: access control in restricted areas,
law enforcement, stolen car detection, automatic toll
collection, car parking automation and border crossing
control.
The process of LPR begins with acquiring vehicle
images that are going to be fed to the LPR system. The
input images could be static pictures of cars or they
could be extracted from video sources. Both of the
techniques have their own pros and cons on the whole
recognition process. The quality of images from video
sequences is usually not clear as static images [3].
Accordingly, LPR systems that detect plate regions
from a video source passes through additional
preprocessing tasks than other LPR systems that work
on still images [1], [2]. Unlike related applications like
document character recognition, LPR systems face a lot
of challenges, including noisy and low quality images,
various illumination conditions and a high degree of
plate‟s orientation. LPR systems are usually dependant
on country‟s plate style, format, character and signs
included in the plates of vehicles. Currently, there are
many countries with their own LPR systems. Although,
there are LPR systems that are designed with an
ambition to work on various scenes [3], [4], [5], they
are still heavily affected by country-specific plate
features [2]. In Ethiopia, the development of intelligent
transport system is in its early stage and, to our best
knowledge, no software product is available to
automatically recognize Ethiopian license plates.
The remaining part of this paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 presents Ethiopian license plate
types and structures. The design of the proposed
system recognizing Ethiopian license plates is
41
discussed in Section 3. Experimental results are 3 Trade Green
presented in Section 4, and conclusion and future
works are highlighted in Section 5. 4 Governmental Black

Ethiopian License Plates 5 Non-governmental Orange

Ethiopian license plates contain numeric and
CD ኮዲ Diplomatic Black
character codes printed in rectangular plates. Character
codes are wrtitten in Amharic and (in most cases)
AU አህ Africa Union Light Green
English characters. Moreover, Ethiopian plates differ
in basic features, such as dimension and plate format. AO ዕድ Aid Organization Orange
The plates exist in five primary dimensions measured
in millimeters: 460x110, 280x200, 305x155, 340x200 UN የተመ United Nation Light Blue
and 520x110. And also, the plates have two basic
formats: single and double row plates. Figure 1 shows ፖሊስ Police Black
sample Ethiopian license plates in various formats. In
broad terms, the features in Ethiopian plates reflect የዕለት Temporary Red
three categories of information: the regions issuing
plates, the intended service of the car, and ተላላፊ Transient Light Blue
alphanumeric code.
ልዩ ተ Special vehicle Red

Regional Codes
License plates can be issued by the federal government or
state governments. License plate issuer provides code of the
region (see Table 2) except for Diplomatic, Africa Union,
Aid Organization and United Nation plate classes where the
federal government issues plates but code of the federal
goverment is not written on the plate.
Table 5. Regional codes used in plates

Issuing English Amharic

Region Code Code

Fig. 4. Some of the various Ethiopian plate styles
Ethiopia ET ኢት

Service Code Addis Ababa AA አአ

Ethiopian license plates are classified into 13 types
based on the vehicle‟s intended service (see Table 1). Amhara AM አማ
Each class can be identified by its code, which is either
numeric or character. Besides, most of the classes vary Afar AF አፋ
in foreground color, even though they have common
white background color except Police vehicles which Benshangul Gumuz BG ቤጉ
have yellow background.
Dire Dawa DR ድሬ
Table 4. Ethiopian license plate classes based on services
Gambella GM ጋም
o
N English Amharic Service Foreground
Harar HR ሐረ
Code Code Code Type Color
Oromiya OR ኦሮ
1 Taxi Red
Somali SM ሶማ
2 Private Blue

42
 Southern Nations, Nationalities & People SP
Tigray TG
Unique Plate Codes
Each region issuing plates is reposnsible to provide
aunique alphanumeric code under each service type. By
doing so (along with region and service codes) the
information contained in the plate becomes unique in
the country. In the case of diplomatic plates, the digits
to the left of the Amharic code “ኮዲ” represent the
code of the diplomatic mission.
The Proposed License Plate
Recognition System
The proposed system has three major modules:
Plate Detection, Character Segmentation and Character
Recognition. The system takes car image as an input
and then it applies a series of various methods and
techniques of plate detection, character segmentation
and recognition algorithms on the input image. Finally,
it stores the license identification number,
region/category and code (if exists) in a flat file in a
way that any further application can read and
understand it. Figure 2 shows the block diagram of the
proposed system.
Car Recognized
Plate
Image
Plate Character Character
Segmentatio Recognition
Detection n removal operations applied on the Gabor filter
Fig. 5. Architecture of the proposed system
Plate Detection
This module of LPR involves detection and
extraction of plate region from a given car image. This
process is a critical phase of the whole system, as the
execution of the other modules of the LPR (i.e.,
character segmentation and character recognition)
depend on its outcome. Thus, a lot of effort is taken
into account in selecting plate detection techniques and
algorithms that compromise the tradeoff between
accuracy and computation time. In the proposed
system, a series of vital techniques are used to detect
plate regions: Gabor Filtering, Morphological Closing
Operation and Connected Component Analysis (CCL).
The RGB image of cars is converted into grayscale
image where we take advantage of one of the popular
ዯሕ features of plates (i.e., texture), to locate potential plate
regions. Plate regions have rich texture information as
ትግ a result of high intensity variations that exist between
plate characters and the plate background. Accordingly,
we used Gabor filter to highlight regions with high
texture information [6]. The parameters for the Gabor
filter are selected empirically by analyzing the filter
responses for different parameters. Figure 3 shows the
Gabor filter responses.
(a) (b)
Fig. 6. (a) Grayscale image, (b) Gabor filter response of a
In the Gabor filter response, high values indicate
regions that have high texture differences, one of which
is the plate region. Thus, binarizing the filter response
separates out higher intensity regions like the plate,
from other regions that have low intensity value. We
apply morphological closing operation on the binarized
image so as to merge individual character objects of the
plate and form a solid rectangular plate region.
Morphological closing operation is followed by small
objects removal the purpose of which is to eliminate a
number of small connected objects that do not need to
be detected as plate regions. Figure 4 shows the result
of the binarization, closing and unwanted small object
response.
We use connected component labeling to detect
connected components/objects (one of which is a plate
region) found in the resultant binary image. For this
case, 8-neighborhood pixels connectivity is selected as
a criterion to label objects. Once objects are labeled,
acceptable aspect-ratio and density values of plate
regions are used to minimize set of candidate plate
regions. Finally, the region with the acceptable size
corresponding to the expected number of characters is
selected as the genuine plate object (see Fig. 5).
43

(a) (b)
Fig. 7. (a) Binarization, (b) morphological closing followed by
small objects removal
(a) (b)
Fig. 8. (a) Candidate plate regions, (b) detected plate region
Segmentation
Given a plate region, segmentation is dedicated to
detecting and segmenting each alpha-numeric
characters found on the extracted plate image.
Although plates have rectangular shapes, detected plate
regions are quite often rotated and skewed while
images are captured. Thus, the first procedure in this
phase is orientation and size normalization.
Segmentation is then performed on the normalized
image where we also have post segmentation process to
separate connected characters and numbers with a prior
knowledge of plate structure information.
Orientation Adjustment and Size Normalization
Orientation adjustment is performed by finding out
the slope of the plate and correcting the plate
orientation according to the identified slope
information. First, edges of the plate region are
highlighted using Canny edge detection algorithm
resulting in a binary image. Then, linear Hough
transform is applied to detect lines. Plate borders
usually form the longest lines from which we compute
the slope of the plate. A spatial transformation that uses
the slope of the longest detected line as a shear factor is
used to correct orientation of plates. We perform
vertical shear transform based spatial transformation
that uses the slope of the longest detected line as shear
factor along the y-axis resulting in horizontally
orientation corrected plate region. The shear matrix m
used in the shear transform is presented as:
1  slope
(3)
m  0 1 
0 0 
When spatial transformation is performed, there are
often pixels in the output image that are not part of the
original input image, which are called a fill value,
usually 0. So, to complete the orientation adjustment
process the final step is extracting the actual plate from
the spatially transformed image. Thus, to achieve this
task, we perform morphological closing operation on
the spatially transformed binary image, followed by
connected component labeling (CCL). Figure 6 shows
resultant images of individual steps in the orientation
adjustment process. Size normalization is finally
performed to minimize variations of the dimensions of
plates occured as a result of capturing images from
different orientation and distance. We have set 160-by-
100 pixel dimension which is found to be sufficient for
character segmentation.
(a) (b) (c)
(d)
[
(e) (f) (g)
Fig. 9. Orientation adjustment of plates: (a) detected plate, (b)
edges of a, (c) vertical shear-transform applied on b, (d) vertical
shear-transform applied on a, (e) morphological closing followed
by CCL on c, (f) mapping detected plate region of e onto d, (g)
extracting plate region from f
The Segmentation Process
Segmentation is achieved by making use of
connected component analysis (CCA) which works
efficiently irrespective of the orientation and location
of the plates and characters. The CCA method used in
this process is similar to the method we used in the
plate detection process, except that the pixels
connectivity used here is 4-neighborhood, which is
adequate to form a character. The CCL operation
detects every group of connected pixels found on the
input image that might be character or not. However,
existence of plate‟s frame has a huge impact on the
character segmentation process, especially, if plate
characters are connected with the plate‟s frame. Thus, a
morphological reconstruction method is used to remove
plate borders resulting in a plate with character objects.
However, there could be noise (such as rivets) in the
44
plate where we used plate characters‟ features such as to improve the recognition accuracy of characters.
acceptable width, height and area to filter the genuine Finally, the unique foreground color of plates for
character objects. Figure 7 shows the results of the circle-coded plates combined with the code numbers is
segmentation process. used to eaily recognize the service type of the car.

Experiment
(a) (b) Dataset Collection
The dataset is built from moving and stationary cars
Fig. 10. (a) Binarized plate region, (b) segmented characters of a where the plate region is visible for human beings and
Post Segmentation contains a total of 350 images taken using a 12-
The layout of Ethiopian license plates can be single megapixel digital camera from different views,
or double row. In addition, numeric codes representing orientations, and distance representing the real-world
service types are circled and located at the left-top application of the system. Images contain cars along
corner of the plate. This knowledge of plate structure with the surrounding environment. A summary of the
information is used to separate physically connected description of the images is given in Table 3.
characters and numbers in the post segmentation phase. Table 6. Dataset description
Connected characters and numbers are easily detected
Sample Illumination Mobility Camera Camera Clarity of plate No of
since they have larger width or height than the average
set condition of cars angle distance background samples
width or height, respectively of characters and
numbers. After identification, the connected object is Set 1 Day Moving 15o-30o 3-5m Average, High 153
segmented into two or more separate parts by Moving,
Set 2 Day 0o-15o 1-3m Average 124
identifying whether they are connected side to side or Stationary
top to bottom using the plate structure information. Moving,
Set 3 Day 0o-15o <1m Low 35
Stationary
Figure 8 shows the result of separating connected
objects. Set 4 Night Moving 0o-15o 1-3m Average 16

Set 5 Shadow Moving 0o-15o <3m Low, Average 14

Set 6 Day, Night Moving 0o-15o <3m Low 8

(a) (b)

Fig. 11. (a) Binarized plate with connected objects, (b) separated
characters and numbers of a
Test Results
The system is developed using Matlab
Recognition programming tool tested on Intel Core i3 2.4GHz
processing unit. Some of the images in the dataset
Characters and numbers are treated differently in contain plates where human observers were unable to
the recognition phase. To avoid numbers mistakely detect and recognize. Excuding those images, we
recognized for characters or vice versa, segmented achieved an overall plate recognition rate of 71.06%,
objects are identified either as numbers or characters and the plate recognition process takes 2-5 seconds
based on their location in the plate. For the recognition depending on whether post processing operations are
purpose we use correlation-based template matching needed or not. The success rate of sub-systems is
method supported by correlation of characters in the shown in Table 4.
plate. Template image sets that constitute plate
character and number appearances on real environment Table 7. Test results
are collected from real world data. The template o
images are binarized and normalized to 24x24 and Sample N of Success rate (%)
24x34 pixel sizes for characters and numbers set samples
Plate Character Character
templates, respectively. During recognition, segmneted
character and number objects are normalized to detection segmentation recognition
respective pixel sizes. In the case of character
recognition in cirle-coded plates, we take advantage of Set 1 153 95.4 84.9 82.3
the fact that plates have both Amharic and equivalent
Set 2 124 92.7 88.7 87.3
English characters. This correlation information is used

45
Set 3 35 88.5 93.5 86.2 module), Using local binarization techniques than
global threshold values, and applying vertical angle
Set 4 16 56.3 33.3 66.6 adjustment on the detected plate region before the
character segmentation process.
Set 5 14 42.8 50.0 100.0

Set 6 8 50.0 - -

Average 88.9 83.9 84.7

From the testing process, we observed that the
character recognition module misclassifies numbers
like 0 for 8, characters ኢ for አ, and አ for ኦ. In
addition, characters and numbers affected by the rivets
of plates have got higher percentage of
misclassification.
Conclusion and Future Works
We presented a system that recognizes Ethiopian
license plates in real-world scenario. The system has
many application areas such as law enforcement,
parking lot, security etc. The fact that we have tested
the system in real scenario (by taking images while
cars are moving or standing) shows that the system
developed can be applied in real time. Better
recognition accuracy even at further distances can be
achieved by capturing images using a high resolution
camera with optical and digital zooming capabilities.
Future work includes applying contrast enhancement
techniques (as a preprocess in the plate detection
REFERENCES
[1] T. Monahan. "War Rooms" of the Street: Surveillance
Practices in Transportation Control Centers, The
Communication Review, 10 (4): 367-389, 2007.
[2] S. Du, M. Ibrahim, M. Shehata and W. Badawy.
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR): A State-
of-the-Art Review, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and
Systems for Video Technology, 23(2): 311-325, 2013.
[3] S. Kranthi, K. Pranathi and A. Srisaila. Automatic
Number Plate Recognition, International Journal of
Advancements in Technology, 2(3), 2011.
[4] M. Ashoori-Lalimi, and S. Ghofrani, An Efficient
Method for Vehicle License Plate Detection in Complex
Scenes, Scientific Research Circuits and Systems,
2:320-325, 2011.
[5] J. Matas, K. Zimmermann. Unconstrained Licence Plate
Detection, In: Proc. 8th Int. IEEE Conf. on Intelligent
Transportation Systems, pp 572-577, Wien, Austria,
2005.
[6] M. Sivalingamaiah and B. Reddy. Texture
Segmentation Using Multichannel Gabor Filtering,
Journal of Electronics and Communication
Engineering, 2(6):22-26, 2012.

46
Designing Amharic Definitive Question Answering
Wondwossen Teshome Tassew
Ministry of Communication and Information Technology
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
wondwossen.teshome@mcit.gov.et
Abstract - The amount of available information written in
Amharic is increasing on the Web proliferation. The problem
faced by the user is not only the lack of documents or
information but also the lack of time to find a short and precise
answer among the variety of available documents. Search
engines offer a lot of links toward web pages, but are not able
to provide an exact answer; instead return ranked documents
based on relevance measure with the posed query from users.
The main goal of Question Answering system is to obtain a
brief and concise answer. Though there are studies towards
developing question – answering system for Amharic factoid
questions, there is no research conducted to develop a
definition question answering system for Amharic. In this
study, an attempt is made to design Amharic question
answering for definitive questions. The proposed Question
Answering deals with Amharic definition question by applying
surface text pattern method. This method considers two main
steps. First, it applies a pattern to discover a set of definition-
related text patterns from the Amharic legal corpus. Then,
using these patterns, it extracts a collection of concept-
description pairs from a target document file, and applies the
definition extraction to return answer to a given question. The
research achieved nugget precision of 85.6 %, nugget recall of
73% and F-measure of 78.8%. Usage of surface patterns is
effective to answer Amharic definition questions. Definiendum
extraction from users question and extracting concept-
descriptions from corpora are the major challenges of this
study. Further sequence mining algorithm can be
experimented to extract concept-description relationship from
the corpus.
Index Terms – Amharic Question Answering,
Question Analysis, Definition Extraction
I. INTRODUCTION
Document retrieval systems have become part
of our daily lives, mostly in using Internet search
engines and tools. Although document retrieval
systems do a great job in finding relevant documents,
given a set of keywords, there are circumstances where
we want more specific information. The conventional
Information Retrieval systems do not really perform
the task of information retrieval; they in fact aim at
only document retrieval. A survey showed 85% of
Martha Yifiru
School of Information science
Addis Ababa University
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
internet usersmartha.yifiru@aau.edu.et
using search engines and search services
attempt to find specific information [1]. The survey
also indicated that users are not satisfied with the
performance of the current search services since
majority of search engines are able to return ranked
lists of related documents only. That means they don‟t
deliver exact answers, so users have to extract the
demanded answer from the large volumes of
information [1]. The virtue of question answering
(QA) systems is that they allow the user to state his or
her information need in a more specific natural
language question, and that they do not return full
documents which have to be skimmed by the user to
determine whether they contain an answer. Instead
question answering systems return short text extract,
or phrases or even precise answers.
II. QUESTION ANSWERING
There are an infinite number of questions users
may ask. The questions can be categorized as Factoid,
List, Definition, Reason, Purpose, and Procedure
questions. We give emphasis to definition question
answering since this research deals with such kind of
questions.
Factoid questions require a single fact as answer [2].
These include question such as “Who is the President
of Ethiopia?/የኢትዮጵያ ፕሬዝዯንት ማን ነው?”
and “What is the capital city of Ethiopia?/የኢትዮጵያ
ዋና ከተማ ማን ነው?”
List questions were originally a simple extension
of the factoid questions [3]. Instead of requiring a
single exact answer, list questions simply required a
fixed sized, unordered set of answers, for example
“Name 5 schools of Addis Ababa University”.
47
Definition Question Answering
Certain types of question cannot be answered by a
single exact answer. For example questions such as
“What is data?/ዳታ ምንድነው?” and “Who is
Abebech Gobena?/አበበች ጎበና ማን ናቸው?” do not
have a single short answer. This type of question is
usually referred to as a definition question. While
definition questions can be natural language questions
there are only a few ways in which they can be
phrased and most are of the form “Who/What is/was
X?”. In these questions X is the definiendum often
referred to as the „target‟ of the question and is the
thing, (be it person, organization, object or event),
which the user is asking the system to define.
The currently accepted evaluation methodology
for definitional questions focuses on the inclusion of a
given nuggets of information in the definition. A
nugget is a single atomic piece of information about
the current target [3]. For example, when asked to
define “ኃይሌ ገብረስላሴ” (Haile Gebresilasie)
systems should include in a definition the following
facts: የሩጫ ጀግና (A hero athlet)፣ የረጅም ርቀት
አትሌት (long distance runner)፣ እና ባለ ሃብት
(investor). Notice that this does not include a lot of
facts that is expected in a full definition of a person.
There is no mention of when or where he was born;
given that he is a hero to whom he runs for; and on
which type of investment he is engaged. Whilst it may
be preferable to update the answer keys so as to more
accurately reflect the information usually contained in
encyclopedia or biographical dictionary entries.
While definitional question answering systems
tend to adopt a similar structure to systems designed to
answer factoid questions, there is often no equivalence
to the question analysis component due to the little
information contained in the question [3]. A process of
extraction of important part of the definiendum is
called Nugget Extraction which is not found in any
other types of QA system [4].
III. RELATED WORK
Many QA systems have been researched
extensively and obtained significant improvement in
performance. The Web is apparently an ideal source of
answers to a large variety of questions due to the
tremendous amount of information available online for
technologically favored languages like English.
Attempts are already done to develop QA
system for different languages worldwide including
English, Chinese, Indian and Amharic.
The research of Chinese QA systems using natural
language was developed later than that of western
countries and Japan.
Techniques of statistical retrieval and shallow
language analysis are chiefly used in QA systems. On
the web-based QA, [5] attempted to represent Chinese
text by its characteristics, and tried to convert the
Chinese text into ERE (E: entity, R: relation) relation
data lists and then to answer the question through ERE
relation model.
An Arabic definitional Question Answering
system was developed by [6]. This QA system is based
on a pattern approach to identify exact and accurate
definitions about organization using Web resources.
The system is experimented using 2000 snippets
returned by Google search engine and Arabic version
of Wikipedia as well as a set of 50 organization
definition questions. The system does not use any
sophisticated syntactic or semantic techniques but
provide effective and exact answers to definition
questions. The system identifies candidate definitions
by using a set of lexical patterns, filters these
candidate definitions by using heuristic rules and ranks
them by using a statistical approach.
An innovative research on Amharic Question
Answer for factoid questions was conducted in [7] and
tried to solve problem in finding precise answers for
Amharic factoid questions. Novel techniques are used
to determine the question types, possible question
focuses, and expected answer types as well as to
generate proper Information Retrieval query, based on
Amharic language specific issue investigations. As to
the performance evaluation of the system, the rule
based question classification module classifies about
89% of the question correctly. The document retrieval
48
component shows greater coverage of relevant the corpus using patterns. The definition searching
document retrieval (97%) while the sentence based component comprises of question analysis and
retrieval has the least (93%). The gazetteer based retrieving the appropriate definition.
answer selection using a paragraph answer selection
technique answers 72% of the questions correctly. The A) Indexing and Definition Identification
file based answer selection technique exhibits a recall The Amharic legal corpus is thoroughly studied
of 90.9%. The pattern based answer selection and advantage is taken on the stylistic nature of
technique has better accuracy for person names using authors to introduce new concept. There are some
paragraph based answer selection technique while the words that usually exist right after the definiendum
sentence based answer selection technique has words (post definiendum words): ማለት, የሚባለው,
outperformed in numeric and date question types. [7] ትርጉም, ትርጉሙ, ሲተሮገም, ሲባል, and ፡-.
Recommended extending the research on other
question types. The first step in the implementation of
DefAmharicQA is document pre-processing. After
document processing each file is read from the
Amharic legal corpus, tokenized and all the tokens are
IV. THE AMHARIC LANGUAGE
saved in a file as list of tokens. Each token are read
Amharic (አማርኛ) is a
dominant language spoken as a
mother tongue by a considerable part
of the population and it is the most
commonly learned second language in
Ethiopia. Amharic is a Semitic
language spoken. Amharic is written
using a writing system called fidel
(ፊዯል) or abugida (አቡጊዳ), adapted
from the one used for the Ge'ez
language [8].

Most Amharic definitive questions

start by the definiendum. The
following are examples of Amharic
definitive question:

 የህግ ትርጉም ምንድነው?

 ኃይሌ ገብረስላሴ ማን ነው?
 ሪኮንስትራክቲቭ ህግ ማለት ምን ማለት ነው?
V. DESIGN OF DEFINITIVE AMHARIC QA
The Amharic definitive question answering system
DefAmharicQA has two main components: Indexing
and definition searching. The indexing component
consists of two subcomponents: pre-processing of the
corpus and extraction of all potential definitions from
Figure 1: Architecture of Amharic QA
and whenever there is a match between the read token
and words in post definiendum the word/ phrase
before the post definiendum are considered as a
concept/ definiendum.
Then the potential definiendum has been pre-
processing and indexed with its description - the
sentence, separated by dollar ($) sign (i.e.

49
<concept>$<description>). This index is kept in a file
called definition catalogue. Therefore, two separate
indices are created; the first is index consisting of
tokens and the second one consisting of candidate
definitions/sentences based on the already identified
signal words. To be relevant, a definition instance
must contain the concept and its description in one
single sentence.
1) Document Pre-processing
Document pre-processing is a procedure which
may include many text operations: Lexical analysis of
the text with the objective of treating digits, hyphens,
and punctuation marks; stemming of the remaining
words with the objective of removing affixes (i.e.,
prefixes and suffixes) and allowing the retrieval of
documents containing syntactic variations of query
terms.
Cognizant of the above, the Amharic legal
corpuses require pre-processing which includes
normalization and stemming to make it ready for
DefAmharicQA system and the different pre-
processing tasks that are performed on the text before
it is indexed.
In this study normalization refers to character and
document level normalizations
Character Normalization: the presence of
several Amharic alphabets (fidels) with the same
sound in the Amharic writing system creates a
problem in text retrieval. The same word written using
different symbols (letters) with the same sound are
considered as different words by the retrieval system.
In this research, choosing one letter from the group of
letters with the same sound and replace the remaining
ones is taken as a solution to the problem. Therefore, if
a character is any of ኀ, ሐ, ሃ, ኃ, and ሓ (all with the
sound „h‟) is normalized to ሀ. Also the different orders
of ሐ and ኃ are changed to their corresponding
equivalent orders of ሀ. Similarly, all orders of ሠ
(with the sound „s‟) are changed to their corresponding
equivalent orders of ሰ, all order of ዐ (with the sound
„a‟) are changed to their corresponding equivalent
orders of አ, all orders of ፀ (with the sound „tse‟) are
changed to their corresponding equivalent orders of ጸ.
Stemming algorithm of [10], Punctuation mark
removal has also been conducted on the corpus.
2) Definition Identification
The definition extraction module identifies and
extracts definition sentences from the relevant
document set. Since it is all-important to provide
enough contexts to ensure the readability of the final
answer, definition QA systems prefer sentences to
nuggets. Definition type questions require word
meaning, term definition, and description of term and
so on. So as to give ample information for the user we
extract a full sentence as answer for users natural
language query.
Extracting definitions is a very important process
in definitional QA systems and there are a number of
definition extraction approaches but hard matching
alignment between a snippet and a lexical pattern is
done slot-by-slot.
While pre-processing is conducted, from the
Amharic legal corpus the maximum possible concept-
dentition is extracted and saved in a file (definition
catalogue). All definitions in the documents are
searched based on concept - description pairs by
applying definition patterns prepared manually by
analysing the stylistic usage of authors to introduce
new concept.
The following patterns are prepared;
‹definiendum› (ማለት|የሚባለው)
‹definiendum› (ወይም) * (በመባል የሚታወቀው
|የሚባለው)
‹definiendum›
(ማለት|የሚባለው|በተለምዶ|በልምድ)* (በመባል
የሚታወቀው|ይባላል) * (ነው|ናቸው)
‹definiendum› (የሚገለፀው|ተብሎ የሚገለፀው) *
(ነው)
‹definiendum› (ትርጉሙ|ትርጉማቸው) *
(ነው|ናቸው)
የ‹definiendum› (ትርጉም) * (ነው)
50
‹definiendum› (ማን|እነማን|ምንድን) * DefAmharicQA. Nearly all of DefAmharicQA’s
(ነው|ናቸው) components depend in some way on the information
In addition definition signal words at the end of produced by question analysis.
the sentence like ነው, ናቸው and ይተሮገማል are used
to identify the concept- description pairs. Even though structurally simpler than the more
general class of fact-seeking questions, definition
B) Searching Definition questions have a few properties which complicate their
processing as there are only few available keyword(s)
The searching definition module starts by in the question.
accepting a natural language question from the user.
Then any punctuation mark is removed from the a) Question particle identification: Despite dealing
question, stemming is applied, and character with a wide variety of natural language inputs,
normalization is performed. There are two components there are some distinctive structures utilized by
in the searching definition module: identifying the users for indicating definition queries. The
question particles are used for different types of
definiendum (query analysis) and answering (return
question formulation. The following table shows
definition). list of a few of the most common definition query
logs.
Definiendum identification is the vital component TABLE 1: DEFINITION QUESTION PARTICLES
of the whole system as it is a decisive factor to answer
the question correctly. Though most Amharic Question particles Question type
definition questions positioned the definiendum at the <definiendum> ማለት ምን ማለት Term/expression
beginning, we formulated algorithm to extract the ነው?
definiendum from the question and advantage of the What does <definiendum> mean?
stylistic presentation of users‟ question is taken. The
<definiendum> ማን ነው?/ Person name,
identified definiendum is captured by a variable. The
<definiendum> ማን ናቸው? place,
last module returns the definition. organization
Who is/are <definiendum>?
1) Question Analysis <definiendum> ምንድነው?/ Term/expression
<definiendum> ምንድን ናቸው?
Given a natural language question as input, the What is/are <definiendum>?
overall function of the question processing module is የ <definiendum> ትርጉም Term/expression
to process and analyse the question, and to create some ምንድነው?
representation of the definiendum. The query for What is the meaning of
search engines and QA systems are different in such a <definiendum>?
way that queries in QA should be more specific to ተርጉም <definiendum> Term/expression
locate relevant documents. Define <definiendum>

The question-answering process in DefAmharicQA

Questions with none of the question particles are
like that of most other question-answering systems
classified as can‟t be answered and no answer is
begins with a question analysis phase that attempts to
returned. Otherwise, it first check the question if it has
determine what the question is asking for and how to
the specific question particles that has clear indication
approach answering it. Question analysis receives
on the question type such as ማለት, የሚባለው,
unstructured natural language question as input and
ምንድነው, ምንድናቸው ትርጉም, ተርጉም which
identifies syntactic and semantic elements of the
always indicate looking for a certain description. If the
question, which are encoded as structured information
that is later used by the other components of definition question contains ማን, ማናቸው, and ማን

51
ናቸው indicates the question focus on such as person,
place and organization type of question types.
b) Query Generation/ Definiendum Extraction: The
goal of query generation is to construct one or
more queries in the query syntax of the document
retrieval engine. Most if not all, question analysis
components create an IR query by starting with a
bag-of- words approach; all the words in the
question ignoring case and order are used to
construct a query [7].
The major problem we face when dealing with
definition questions is that little or no information is
provided other than the target itself which makes it
difficult to construct rich IR queries that locates
relevant documents. For instance submitting the target
ሃይሌ ገብረስላሴ as two terms to an IR engine not only
retrieve relevant documents but also documents about
the famous film producer ሃይሌ ገሪማ and other people
with the name ሃይሌ could be retrieved by such a
query.
As question answer systems attempt to define
a given target, it is likely that relevant documents
contain the definiendum in the text and so one possible
approach to improving the retrieval and hence the
quality of the resulting passages, is to use the target as
a phrase when searching a text collection (i.e. in a
relevant document both terms must appear next to
each other, ignoring stopwords, and in the same order
as in the query). For a simple example such as ሃይሌ
ገብረስላሴ this approach has the desired effect
dramatically reducing the number of documents
retrieved from the collection while retaining those
which are actually about the target.
Equation 1: Official definition of F-measure
Let:
r # of vital nuggets returned in a response
a # of non-vital nuggets returned in a response
R total # of vital nuggets in the assessors’ list
l # of non-whitespace characters in the entire
answer string then,
Nugget Recall (R)= r/ R
Allowance ( ) =
Finally,
In this work, the assumption is that both nugget
precision and nugget recalls are equally important
(i.e β = 1).
Users‟ natural language questions are not submitted to
the indexed file as it is. It requires some modifications
that enhance the possibility of matching relevant
concept from the dictionary catalogue. Query
generation sub-module is very critical. Incorrect
queries might result in returning irrelevant description
that lead to extract incorrect definition answer. This in
turn reduces recall significantly as there could be
unmatched documents with the query. The query
generation sub-module includes removal of
punctuation marks, stemming, character normalization,
number normalization for Ge‟ez numerals and
stopwords removal and synonym expansion.
Amharic documents used both types of numbering
so that the different variations of numbers are included
to the query (query expansion).
The query term may contain regular expressions
such as “([definiendum] |ማለት | ምንድነው)”,
“(የ[definiendum] ትርጉም)”, “(ተርጉም+
[definiendum])” etc. Therefore documents are matched
also based on the regular expressions besides the
normal query terms. We have identified a number of
words that provide signal for the position of
definiendum from construction of natural anguage
query and we classify them based on their position in
the query as shown below.
1: ማለት የሚባለው ትርጉም
2: ተርጉም ፍታ አብራራ ዐብራራ ዓብራራ ኣብራራ ግለፅ
ግለጽ ማለት የሚባለው በተለምዶ በልምድ ምን ምንድን
ማን እነማን ትርጉሙ ትርጉማቸው የሚገልፀው
Our algorithm works based on the number of tokens in user
question and based on the lists we constructed.
2) Retrieving definition
To return the answer for the definition question,
the indexed file which contains concept-description
pair is opened and search for a match between the
concept and definiendum. If the definiendum is found
in the dictionary catalogue it displays the answer;
otherwise it displays a message “No answer”.
52
VI. EXPERIMENT TABLE 2: SUMMARY OF NORMALIZATION VS PERFORMANCE

To develop our prototype Python programming Before normalization After normalization

language is used as it is an ideal language to process
text that supports Unicode. Amharic corpora most of Precision Recall F-measure Precision Recall F-measure

them are related to law are collected from

http://www.abyssinialaw.com/ and the concerned
organ and definition questions are prepared to evaluate
the prototype.
Evaluation of DefAmharicQA is mainly for
accuracy and recall of answers. Precision for definition
QA is calculated as the number of correct concepts
retrieved to the total number of concepts retrieved.
The assessment takes into consideration the number of
non-whitespace characters in the entire answer string,
number of vital nuggets retrieved, and number of non-
vital nuggets retrieved. The length-based measure used
a system an allowance of 100 (non-white-space)
characters for each correct concept it retrieves.
1) Evaluation of Definiendum Identification
0.78 0.44 0.49 0.83 0.52 0.56
From the above table it is inferred that document
normalization has a significant effect on precision and
recall of DefAmharicQA. In some questions, though
the question processing module identifies the
definiendum properly from the natural language
questions couldn‟t match with the appropriate target
word from the document because of the orthography
differences. For instance the question “ህግ ማለት ምን
ማለት ነው?” didn‟t get the appropriate definition even
if the question processing module identify “ሕግ” as
definiendum but the definition extraction module
couldn‟t extract definition and the system responded
No answer. As a result recall is penalized and
precision reduced as compared to the normalized one.

3) Effect of Stemming on Effectiveness

DefAmharicQA‟s question processing module has
been evaluated for identification of the definiendum
The performance of DefAmharicQA has been
correctly as improper identification of the definiendum
evaluated before and after stemming. This evaluation
leads to incorrect result that affect the performance of
shows us the impact of stemming on performance.
the system. A hard pattern rule based technique is used
to identify the definiendum. Other than the twenty TABLE 3: EFFECT OF STEMMING ON PERFORMANCE
performance testing questions, seventeen questions are
Before stemming After stemming
used to evaluate the query processing module, of
which the module identifies fifteen (88.24%) Precision Recall F- Precision Recall F-measure
definiendums properly but it wrongly identifies two measure

(11.76%) as definiendums. 0.83 0.52 0.56 0.856 0.730 0.788

2) Normalization and Performance

Stemming increases the performance of
The performance of DefAmharicQA has been evaluated DefAmharicQA.
before and after punctuation marks removal and stemming.
This evaluation shows us the significant effect of
punctuation marks removal for performance. Out of the 20 4) Evaluation of DefAmharicQA
questions the system doesn‟t retrieve a single vital nugget
for seven questions. The final system performance experiment is
conducted under the assumption that both nugget
precision and nugget recalls are equally important
(𝑖. 𝑒 𝛽 = 1).

53
 The human assessor prepared all vital and non-
vital nuggets of answers for each question manually.
The system performance is tested based on the
retrieved and not-retrieved number of nuggets for each
question and cross checked with the assessor list of the
ground truths.
The calculated average evaluation metrics are:
nugget precision = 85.6%%, nugget recall = 73 % and
F-measure = 78.8%
The normalized and stemmed based answering
Amharic definition question technique outperforms the
others (i.e. without normalization and stemming).
TABLE 4: SUMMARY OF PERFORMANCE OF DefAmharicQA
Correct Wrong No Precision Recall F-
answer answer measure
Answer
(𝛽 = 1)
(85%) (15%) (0%) 0.856 0.730 0.788
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this research we proposed a definitional
Question Answering system for Amharic language.
This system answers legal definition questions
expressed in Amharic language for a closed legal
corpus. It is based on an approach which employs a
little linguistic analysis and language understanding
capability. DefAmharicQA identifies candidate
definitions by using a set of lexical patterns. For this
study hard pattern matching is used to extract concept
– description relations from the Amharic corpus and to
identify definiendum from user‟s natural language
question.
DefAmharicQA system is evaluated using
Amharic documents and 20 definitive questions. The
evaluation shows that obtained results are very
encouraging. DefAmharicQA succeeded in generating
pertinent definitions for seventeen out of 20 definition
questions. The system provided answer sets for 17 of
the 20 questions (85%). For these 20 questions, 10
(50%) questions contained all the vital nuggets of the
assessor list. The system achieved nugget recall of
73.0%, nugget precision of 85.6% and F-measure of
78.8%. We found extracting concept-description
relationship from the corpora is the major language
dependent component of the system in addition to
query analysis.
Application of surface text pattern makes the
system effective. From the research we inferred
normalization and stemming increases the
performance of Amharic question answering for
definitive questions.
However, the system's effectiveness is highly
affected by identification of the definiendum word/
phrase(s) and extraction of definitions from the corpus.
The major reasons are definition and answer patterns
are prepared manually, inappropriate descriptions are
extracted for a concept from the corpus and the
question analysis
Although, this research attempted to develop a
closed domain definition question answer system with
a promising F-measure value. The following issues
must be dealt with to increase the effectiveness and
efficiency of the system.
-Sequence mining algorithm: An automatic sequence
mining algorithms can be used to extract concept-
description relationship from large corpora.
-Amharic spell checker: integrating Amharic spelling
checker helps to improve performance as users usually
make mistake while writing the query.
-Standard corpus: having standard corpus to measure
the performance of definition question answer system
is essential.
Develop a definition QA system for other Ethiopic
languages
Integrating with Amharic search engine
-Amharic WordNet: the development of Amharic
WordNet is very essential that includes word
synonym, hyponym, and antonym so as to increase the
recall ability of the system.
54
-Named Entity Extractor: target extraction is a key,
non-trivial capability critical to the success of a
definition question answer system. Similarly, database
lookup works only if the relevant definiendum are
identified and indexed while preprocessing the corpus.
Both of these issues point to the need for a more robust
named-entity extractor, capable of handling
specialized names (e.g., “እሳቱ ተሰማ”, “የሸዋወርቅ”,
“አትጠገብ“,…).
-NLP tools: The improvement of the NLP tools that
are used in this research is another area that needs
much work: to improve the syntactical parser and,
specially, the semantic analyzer (which is a quite open
problem in the NLP community).
[3] Andrew, G. M. (2005). Open-Domain Question Answering. PhD
Thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield.
[4] Figueroa, A. G. (2010). Finding Answers to Definition Questions on
the Web. A dissertation submitted to the Philosophy Faculty of
Saarland University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Saarland, Department of
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics.
[5] Huang, G. T. (2004). Chinese question-answering system. Journal of
Computer Science and Technology , 19.
[6] Omar Trigui, L. H. (2008). DefArabicQA: Arabic Definition Question
Answering System. University of Sfax.
[7] Seid, Yimam. (2009). Amharic Question Answering System for factoid
Questions. MSc Thesis, Addis Ababa University, Department of
Computer Science, Addis Ababa.
[8] Tessema Mindaye, M. S. (2010). The Need for Amharic WordNet.
[9] Greenwood, A. (2005). Open-Domain Question Answering. PhD
Thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield.
[10] Nega Alemayehu, Willet P. (2002) Stemming of Amharic Words for
Information Retrieval. In Literary and Linguistic Computing. 17 No.1,
pp. 1-17. Oxford: Oxford University press.

-Stemmer: To enhance the Amharic definitive question

answering system performance, further studies should
be conducted to design an effective stemmer that can
stem infixes for Amharic words since it is rich in
morphology.

-Query expansion: Future researches can also improve

the performance of the system by exploring and
integrating query expansion techniques.

-Domain experts: to reduce the effect of judgment on

categorization of vital and non-vital nuggets team of
experts has to be participated in the evaluation. In this
study only one legal expert is participated.

-Open-domain: This research is conducted on closed

domain corpora hence the same research can be
extended to open domain Amharic definition
questions.

Amharic question answering can be regarded as at

its infant stage, therefore researchers can develop on
other types (how, why, list etc) of QA to assist users so
as to get precise and concise answer for their query.

REFERENCES

[1] Liu, J. (2007). An Intelligent FAQ Answering System Using a

Combination of Statistic and Semantic IR Techniques. Department of
Computer Science and Electronics at Mälardalen University.
[2] Saggion, M. A. (2004). A Pattern Based Approach to Answering
Factoid, List and Definition Questions. University of Shefield,
Department of Computer Science, Shefield.

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martha.yifiru@aau.edu.et