Unification-Based Persian Morphology
Karine Megerdoomian
Abstract
This paper presents a complete formalization of Persian inflectional morphology
using a unification-based framework. The morphological analyzer was
developed for use in a Persian-English machine translation system; it
computes the part of speech categories and returns all syntactically
relevant inflectional features for a word. The morphological analyses
are represented as feature structures, which can easily be used by a
syntactic parser. The morphological formalism consists of a
declarative description of rules utilizing typed feature
structures. Persian morphotactics include a few prefixes and sequences
of suffixes with co-occurrence constraints between non-adjacent
morphemes. The verbal inflectional morphology is rich and is
characterized by a complex system of conjugations. A morphological
rule associates a regular expression describing a set of character
strings to a typed feature structure. Rules can be combined using
regular expression operators and they can be factorized in conjugation
tables. The morphological engine is implemented as a finite-state
transducer where the left projection is the input string and the right
projection is a typed feature structure.
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