Two-Level Model for Morphological Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a new linguistic, computationally implemented model . for mophological analysis and synthes1s. It lS general in the sense that the same language independent algorithm and the s~me computer program can operate on a w1de range oi languages, including highly inflected ones such as Finnish, Russian or Sanskrit. The new model is unrestricted in scope and it is capable of handling the whole language system as well as ordinary running text. A full description for Finnish has been completed and tested, and the entries in the Dictionary of Modern Standard Finnish have been converted into a format compatible with it. The model is based on a lexicon that defines the word roots, inflectTonal mor-phemes and certain nonphonological alternation patterns, and on a set of E~£ . al!.~!. rules that define phonologically oriented phenomena. The rules are implemented as parallel finite state automata, a~d the same description can be run both 1n the producing and in the analyzing direction.