Computational Morphology: Practical Mechanisms for the English Lexicon(Computational Morphology)

Computational Morphology is the first book to present an integrated set of techniques for the rigorous description of morphological phenomena in English and similar languages. Previous work on morphology has largely tended either to avoid precise computational details or to ignore linguistic generality. Computational Morphology is the first book to present an integrated set of techniques for the rigorous description of morphological phenomena in English and similar languages. By taking account of all facets of morphological analysis, it provides a linguistically general and computationally practical dictionary system for use within an English parsing program. The authors cover morphographemics (variations in spelling as words are built from their component morphemes), morphotactics (the ways that different classes of morphemes can combine, and the types of words that result), and lexical redundancy (patterns of similarity and regularity among the lexical entries for words). They propose a precise rule-notation for each of these areas of linguistic description and present the algorithms for using these rules computationally to manipulate dictionary information. These mechanisms have been implemented in practical and publicly available software, which is described in detail, and appendixes contain a large number of computer-tested sets of rules and lexical entries for English.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Introduction: the need for a computational lexicon; what is the lexicon?; morphology; segmentation and orthography; word structure; the unit of storage; lexical redundancy; preprocessing and look-up; what this book is about. Part 2 Morphographemics: generative phonology; formalizing phonological rules; transducers; the two-level model; the transducer version; the two-level rule notation; the lexicon and word grammar interface; formal issues. Part 3 Word structure rules: context free rules; features and categories; the word structure formalism; varieties of unification; the term unification enhancements; the role of the word grammar; an illustrative. Part 4 Feature propagation in the word grammar: beyond structural rules; other theories of feature propagation; feature-passing conventions; usefulness of conventions. Part 5 Lexical rules: lexicon expansion; the role of lexical rules; format of lexical rules; completion rules; multiplication rules; consistency checks; application of lexical rules; lexicon management; the advantages of lexical rules. Part 6 A description of English: overview of the model; what is a morpheme?; stems and affixes; morphographemics; lexical rules and defaults; syntactic features; inflection and derivation; classifying words; the word grammar; feature conventions; illustrative examples; over-generation; a caveat. Part 7 The implemented system: facilities provided; the lexicon; spelling rules; the word grammar; the analysis process; dictionary command interpreter; other implementation issues; practical considerations. Part 8 Limitations and extensions: spelling rules; word grammar and feature conventions; lexical entries and rules; idioms; compounds; irregularity and blocking; the implemented system. Appendices: definition of the linguistic notation; syntactic and morphological features; some sample lexical entries; a description of English morphology; sample results of lexical look-up; formal definitions; complexity of two-level morphology.

About the Author :
Alan W. Black is currently a research student at the University of Edinburgh. Stephen G. Pulman is a Lecturer in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Director of SRI International's Cambridge Computer Science Research Centre. Graeme D. Ritchie is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Graham J. Russell is a Research Fellow at ISSCO (Institut Dalle Molle pour les études sémantiques et cognitives) in Geneva.