Tagging Part of Speech in Hausa Sentences

Abstract

Despite the recent exponential growth of Hausa online content on websites like Aminiya.dailytrust.com.ng, Freedomradio.com, Hausa.Leadership.ng, Arewa24.com, and BBC.com/hausa, Sentiment Analysis on such Hausa web content have not been explored in the research community. Thus, Sentiment Analysis of Hausa based web content is a virgin researchable area. However, there are some pre-requisite activities prior to conducting sentiment analysis such as stemming/Lemmatization of words, and Part of Speech (POS) tagging. Unfortunately, for Hausa language, researches towards tools and techniques for these pre-requisite activities are still in the infancy stage, with little work done on stemming of words, but no work so far on Lemmatization and POS tagging. Consequently, this research work proposes a technique/model for POS tagging of Hausa sentences towards the realization of sentiment analysis of Hausa web content. The work is in progress. Preliminary results are encouraging.