Incremental Identification of Inflectional Types

Abstract

We present an approach to the incremental accrual of lexical information for unknown words that is constraint-based and compatible with standard unification-based grammars. Although the techniques are language-independent and can be applied to all kinds of information, in this paper we concentrate on the domain of German noun inflection. We show how morphological information, especially inflectional class, is successfully acquired using a type-based HPSG-like analysis. Furthermore, we sketch an alternative strategy which makes use of finite-state transducers.