Experiences with developing language processing tools and corpora for Amharic

A major bottleneck for promoting use of computers and the Internet is that many languages lack access to basic tools that would make it possible for people to access ICT in their own language. The paper describes the development a set of such resources for the processing of Amharic, the working language of the Ethiopian government. The primary goal was to investigate techniques and methods that can be used to efficiently create computational linguistic resources for new languages based on existing tools and resources. The resources created consist of linguistically annotated text collections and tools for word-level analysis of Amharic.