# Shona spaCy: A Morphological Analyzer for an Under-Resourced Bantu Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16680/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Neural Machine Translation for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05467/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite rapid advances in multilingual natural language processing (NLP), the Bantu language Shona remains under-served in terms of morphological analysis and language-aware tools. This paper presents Shona spaCy, an open-source, rule-based morphological pipeline for Shona built on the spaCy framework. The system combines a curated JSON lexicon with linguistically grounded rules to model noun-class prefixes (Mupanda 1-18), verbal subject concords, tense-aspect markers, ideophones, and clitics, integrating these into token-level annotations for lemma, part-of-speech, and morphological features. The toolkit is available via pip install shona-spacy, with source code at https://github.com/HappymoreMasoka/shona-spacy and a PyPI release at https://pypi.org/project/shona-spacy/0.1.4/. Evaluation on formal and informal Shona corpora yields 90% POS-tagging accuracy and 88% morphological-feature accuracy, while maintaining transparency in its linguistic decisions. By bridging descriptive grammar and computational implementation, Shona spaCy advances NLP accessibility and digital inclusion for Shona speakers and provides a template for morphological analysis tools for other under-resourced Bantu languages.