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<Paper uid="W05-0109">
  <Title>Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="54" end_page="55" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
9 Results
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Except for the contents of the course, the main innovation for the Information Science students was that the bulk of the course reading list and relevant materials were available online. The students were able to access the materials according to their own needs -- in terms of time schedule -- and download and print it without having to go to the library to copy books and papers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Another feature of the on-line availability was that after the end of the course and as the teaching team left the country, the supervision of the students' theses was carried out exclusively through the Internet by e-mail and chat. The final papers with the signatures of the supervisors were even sent electronically to the department. The main difficulty that had to be overcome concerned the actual writing of the theses; the students were not very experienced in producing academic text and required some distance training, through comments and suggestions, on the subject.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The main results of the course were that, based strictly on the course aims, students were successfully familiarised with the notion of NLP. This also led to eight students choosing to write their Master theses on speech and language issues: two on speech technology, on text-to-speech synthesis for Tigrinya and on speech recognition for Amharic; three on Amharic information access, on information filtering, on information retrieval and text categorisation, and on automatic text summarisation; one on customisation of a prototype English-to-Amharic transfer-based machine translation system; one on predictive SMS (Short Message Service) text  input for Amharic; and one on Amharic part-of-speech tagging. Most of these were supervised from Stockholm by the NLP course teaching team, with support from the teaching staff in Addis Ababa.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> As a short-term effect, several scientific papers were generated by the Master theses efforts. As a more lasting effect, a previously fairly unknown field was not only tapped, but also triggered the students' interest for further research. Another important result was the strengthening of the connections between Ethiopian and Swedish academia, with on-going collaboration and supervision, also of students from later batches. Still, the most important long-term effect may have been indirect: triggered by the success of the course, the Addis Ababa Faculty of Informatics in the spring of 2005 decided to establish a professorship in Natural Language Processing.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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