Linguistic problems in multilingual morphological decomposition

Abstract

An algorithm for the morphological decomposition of words into morphemes is presented. The application area is information retrieval, and the purpose is to find morphologically related terms to a given search term. First, the parsing framework is presented, then several linguistic decisions are discussed: morpheme selection and segmentation, morpheme classes, morpheme grammar, allomorph handling, etc. Since the system works in several languages, language-specific phenomena are mentioned.