Automated detection of morphemes using distributional measurements

Abstract

To simply take the distribution of linguistic elements as a basis for analysis was the methodological prime of researchers of the so-called "American Structuralism". This paper deals with the detection of morphemes from a large corpus of German by simply applying a distributional procedure of counting the number of potential successors of a given sequence of letters of a word, a method reminiscent of proposals by Harris, Shannon and others. Morphemes can be heuristically read off by an increase in the potential successor count. Three different methods of identifying morpheme breaks are discussed and a proposal for improvement of the method by transforming graphemic to partial phonemic representation is put forward. © Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg 2005.