A word-grammar based morphological analyzer for agglutinative languages

Abstract

Agglutinative languages present rich morphology and for some applications they need deep analysis at word level. The work here presented proposes a model for designing a full morphological analyzer. The model integrates the two-level formalism and a unification-based formalism. In contrast to other works, we propose to separate the treatment of sequential and non-sequential morphotactic constraints. Sequential constraints are applied in the segmentation phase, and non-sequential ones in the final feature-combination phase. Early application of sequential morphotactic constraints during the segmentation process makes feasible an efficient implementation of the full morphological analyzer. The result of this research has been the design and implementation of a full morphosyntactic analysis procedure for each word in unrestricted Basque texts.