Compounding and derivational morphology in a finite-state setting

Abstract

This paper proposes the application of finite-state approximation techniques on a unification-based grammar of word formation for a language like German. A refinement of an RTN-based approximation algorithm is proposed, which extends the state space of the automaton by selectively adding distinctions based on the parsing history at the point of entering a context-free rule. The selection of history items exploits the specific linguistic nature of word formation. As experiments show, this algorithm avoids an explosion of the size of the automaton in the approximation construction.