Challenges for and Perspectives on the Malagasy Language in the Digital Age

This paper is a revised and extended version of my LTC 2015 contribution [26]. It shows the state of Malagasy language at the present time and deals with challenges and perspectives. To enter in the digital age, languages must provide resources and tools. The creation of useful tools such as spell checkers or machine translation systems would introduce Malagasy into the era of new technology. It encourages users to use the language more. However, it is usually the work of specialists of Natural Language Processing (NLP). For Malagasy, an agglutinative language, the collaboration between specialists of NLP and linguists is required. This paper surveys tools and resources that have been constructed for Malagasy, and, among others, a project [24, 27] based on the DELA framework [14] to construct NLP dictionaries of Malagasy by using conventional dictionaries and converting them into a structured, but readable and manually updatable, resource usable by Unitex [18]. We report on the ongoing construction of NLP dictionaries of verbs, nouns from verbs, grammatical words with the same DELA methodology and we discuss the dictionaries of simple words and multi-word units.