Wanjiku Ng'ang'a

TparvaDB: a database to support Theileria parva vaccine development

We describe the development of TparvaDB, a comprehensive resource to facilitate research towards development of an East Coast fever vaccine, by providing an integrated user-friendly database of all genome and related data currently available for Theileria parva. TparvaDB is based on the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) platform. It contains a complete reference genome sequence, Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs), Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) expression tag data and related information from both public and private repositories. The Artemis annotation workbench provides online annotation functionality. TparvaDB represents a resource that will underpin and promote ongoing East Coast fever vaccine development and biological research. Database URL: http://tparvadb.ilri.cgiar.org

Building Swahili Resource Grammars for the Grammatical Framework

Grammatical Framework (GF) is a multilingual parsing and generation framework. In this paper, we describe the development of the Swahili Resource Grammar, a first in extending GF’s coverage with a Bantu language. The paper details the linguistic detail and considerations that have to be addressed whilst defining the grammars. The paper also describes an end-user application that uses the developed grammars to achieve multilinguality.

InterlinguaPlus Machine Translation Approach for Local Languages: Ekegusii and Swahili

This paper elucidates the InterlinguaPlus design and its application in bi-directional text translations between Ekegusii and Kiswahili languages unlike the traditional translation pairs, one-by-one. Therefore, any of the languages can be the source or target language. The first section is an overview of the project, which is followed by a brief review of Machine Translation. The next section discusses the implementation of the system using Carabao’s open machine translation framework and the results obtained. So far, the translation results have been plausible particularly for the resource-scarce local languages and clearly affirm morphological similarities inherent in Bantu languages.