This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
1.4. Summary
In this chapter, we learned that morphology can be looked at from opposing viewpoints: one that tries to find the structural components from which words are built versus a more syntax-driven perspective wherein the functions of words are the focus of the study. Another distinction can be made between analytic and generative aspects of morphology or can consider man-made morphological frameworks versus systems for unsupervised induction of morphology. Yet other kinds of issues are raised about how well and how easily the morphological models can be implemented.
We described morphological parsing as the formal process recovering structured information from a linear sequence of symbols, where ambiguity is present and where multiple interpretations should be expected.
We explored interesting morphological phenomena in different types of languages and mentioned several hints in respect to multilingual processing and model development.
With Korean as a language where agglutination moderated by phonological rules is the dominant morphological process, we saw that a viable model of word decomposition can work at the morphemes level, regardless of whether they are lexical or grammatical.
In Czech and Arabic as fusional languages with intricate systems of inflectional and derivational parameters and lexically dependent word stem variation, such factorization is not useful. Morphology is better described via paradigms associating the possible forms of lexemes with their corresponding properties.
We discussed various options for implementing either of these models using modern programming techniques.