TETFUND: IFẸ́-BODY PART

Human Body-part Learning Tool This facility provides learners with an introduction to the concept of culture by investigating shared and unique features of all human beings using indigenous languages in order to retain values and to aid communication. Names for parts of the human body is a fundamental resource for learning language. Beyond mere collection of body parts terminology, this component also implements a multimedia tutor for human body parts for the selected indigenous languages. This program will be made available over the research website at the discretion of the Tetfund. However, a restricted version can be accessed through the CISRG web-page.

TETFUND: IFẸ́-BODY PART

This is the Digital Language Resource created and refined at various stages during this research. The resources are in various digital forms including text(.txt), images(.png), audio in (.wav) and video (MP3). The Database was design and the language objects and data were collected, digitised, preprocessed and stored in Yorùbá, Hausa and Igbo. These have been fomatted in a form usable for access through computer program. This is the resource used for the development of our system and they have been made available for members of our research group for research and teaching purposes. The soft copy is available on disk and memory sticks. Each of these applications have been enhanced to run on Android platform.

TETFUND: IFẸ́-DICO

This is a general terminologies Learning Tool. This program implements the general terminologies component as a multi-media (text, image, audio and video), multi-lingua (Yorùbá, Hausa and Igbo with English as the anchor language) dictionary of names of common objects and concepts in a typical African environment. This includes names of animals, plants, insects, places, structure and objects such as house hold tools and utensil, farming tools, etc. that are commonly found in an African community. This program is available over the Research website and a restricted form can be accessed through the webpage.

TETFUND: IFẸ́-KEY

This aspect of the project was carried out to create digital Keyboards for the selected language. The creation of these keyboards was necessitated by the need for the correct rendering of the orthography of the indigenous languages in digital forms. The standard hard-wired keyboards were not designed for the letters of Hausa, Igbo and Yorùbá. Though some keys on the keyboards can be used for typesetting basic letters, there is no direct keys or combination of keys for realising important letters in the indigenous languages. This is particularly so when diacritic marks and under-dots must be indicated on standard letters of the alphabet for example the Yorùbá letters Ẹ́ and Ọ̀

To address the problem, we developed Android based digital keyboards software application for the Hausa, Igbo and Yorùbá languages

TETFUND: IFẸ́-ÒNKÀ

Numeration and its associated arithmetic are an important aspect of mathematics. Investigating how numbering and arithmetic is done in an indigenous language with the purpose of understanding it well enough to develop a software for it was considered as an important task early during this research. The Yorùbá language was purposely selected for this task because of its rich literature and the fact that members of the research team are very familiar with its system of arithmetic. ÒNKÀ, as a part of the ÌSIRÒ aspect of this project, involves the development of a Numeration and Arithmetic Learning Tool` using the Yorùbá number system.

TETFUND: IFẸ́-MT

Very early in the project design phase it was realised that an important application that can be readily developed using the collected digital data in respect of the language resource is a machine translation software. Translating text from English to the selected Nigerian indigenous languages presented an interesting and challenging application software problem. This is because, its development involves the use of concepts in Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically those in the subfield of Human Language Processing (HLP). Language translation tool facilitates the translation of text across languages and provides a powerful language learning tool. The machine translation component implemented makes it possible to use the English platform as an anchor language for learning and communicating across the indigenous languages. For example, if a Yorub` a´ learner can construct a sentence in English, the Hausa or Igbo translations of the sentence can be generated using the IFẸ́-MT system.

IFẸ́-MT software application have generated a lot of interests within and outside the university community. For example, a number of enquiries have been received in term of request to commercialise some of the products from within and outside the university. This has generated a lot of motivations for the research group members.