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<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu">maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu</a> wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid20080502145511.nillxm243ogw0wco@mail.ldc.upenn.edu"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Quoting Heather Souter <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:hsouter@gmail.com"><hsouter@gmail.com></a>:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I, too, am very interested in learning about dictionary development
for languages with complex morphologies. ...
Any insight into how to create dictionaries that are useful to
speakers and learners and not only language specialists would be
especially welcomed!
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
One "solution" (quote marks explained at the end of this msg) is to
give people a computer program that allows them to look up words
regardless of the inflected form that they type in. For the simple
cases, this can often be done by just looking for a substring of the
typed-in word. For a purely suffixing language, the substring would
begin at the first letter of the typed-in word.
Of course, the simple cases are not the ones where people need the most
help. The complex cases--where there is prefixing (or worse, both
prefixing and suffixing), or infixing, or reduplication, or lots of
stem allomorphy--are the ones where people need help, and where the
simple solutions don't work. For these morphologically complex
languages, there needs to be a morphological parser between the user
and the electronic dictionary per se.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
For a dictionary user to be able to look up any wordform in a
computer-based (maybe online) dictionary, another approach would be to
explicitly list all forms in the dictionary. Since such a dictionary
would take a lot of paper to print, we're in the habit of avoiding such
an approach. But as I've explored the capabilities of the FLEx program,
it strikes me that there seems to be an appropriate place to explicitly
list any wordform that we might desire to include as a lookup form. A
derived form can be given its own place as the headword of an entry,
and linked as a "complex form" to the root or stem from which it's
derived. An inflected form can be given its own place as the headword
of a minor entry and linked as an "inflectional variant" to the
uninflected form of the stem, or to the inflected form that users will
most likely try to look up.<br>
<br>
Automated parsing could still have a role in such a dictionary, but the
role would be to assist in building the dictionary rather than to
assist in reading it. When analyzing words that it encounters in
vernacular texts, the parser would draw its conclusion regarding what
roots and affixes make up the word, and thus what entries it should be
linked to. Based on his knowledge of the actual meanings of the words,
the human dictionary compiler would then evaluate whether to accept the
parser's choice or make links that the parser didn't predict. If it
involves some regularity of the language that the parser just doesn't
yet handle, the dictionary compiler could use this parser failure as
feedback to help improve the parser's success in future predictions. If
it involves an irregularity of the language which can't reasonably be
captured by the parser, then it can just be left as residue as far as
the parser is concerned. A dictionary user will still be able to find
the word, since it has been explicitly listed and linked.<br>
<br>
This approach wouldn't do anything for the finding of words that
haven't yet been encountered in texts. So once the parser has "learned"
the language well enough to give fairly reliable results, it might be
profitable to combine Mike's approach with this one - using the parser
for lookup of any words that don't yet have exact matches in the
dictionary. And whenever this happens, the newly looked-up words could
be submitted for human review so that they can be explicitly listed for
future lookups.<br>
<br>
Allan J.<br>
<br>
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