[Corpora-List] Microsoft patents verb conjugations

[Antti Arppe]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, John F. Sowa wrote:
> If anybody has been deriving the infinitive of a verb from a finite 
> form, you may be violating a recent patent application by Microsoft. 
> (However, I suspect that there may be prior art that had been 
> published earlier.)

Well, if MS has forgotten to patent a system for noun declinations it 
seems that this MS patent is from the onset essentially less powerful 
than those available for decades now in the form of general 
computational models for morphological analysis and generation (e.g. 
Koskenniemi's two-level formalism or Karttunen et al's transductors), 
which apply equally to all inflecting word classes, not just verbs. 
One publicly available document outlining such a system dates from 
1984, i.e. Kimmo Koskenniemi. A General Computational Model for 
Word-Form Recognition and Production. In Proceedings of COLING-84, 2-4 
July 1984, Stanford University, California, pp. 178-181, U.S.A. 
(1984), which can be found on the via 
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=980529.

Furthermore, as a speaker of a highly inflecting language, i.e. 
Finnish, with theoretically upto 20,000 word forms morphologically 
derivable for any verb, I wonder how MS' system would cope with 
generating the whole lot. Incidentally, in MS' patent application, 
there doesn't seem to be any indication of statistically based 
selection of the most common forms to cope with this situation - maybe 
I should patent that myself...

In addition, MS appears to be trying tp patent in this application a 
spelling checking functionality which has existed for ages in both 
their own spell checkers as well as one subconctracted from others, 
namely generating morphologically correct word forms within an edit 
distance of one form a typo.

Yeah, this patent application is really ridiculous, but I suppose 
anything is possible in the US.

 	-Antti Arppe
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Antti Arppe - Master of Science (Engineering)
Researcher & doctoral student (Linguistics)
E-mail: antti.arppe at helsinki.fi
WWW: http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~aarppe