[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Sean M. Burke]

At 02:16 AM 2004-05-26, Antti Arppe wrote:
>[...]As a natural consequence, Finnish researchers among others have had
>to resort to various solutions, which combine a basic lexicon and a rule
>system, which can then be converted into a morphological analysis program.
>Probably one of the best known such approach is prof. Kimmo Koskenniemi's
>Two-Level Model which has in one extent or another been applied for
>applied to some one hundred languages, including Klingon.

In my experience, Kimmo's formalisms (last I looked) were way too
simplistic to handle anything with actually complex morphophonology.

Some years ago, I sketched out a heuristic-pruned search-space approach to
polysynthetic parsing to Dan Jurafsky, but I think his hard drive crashed
right after I sent it, so feh.

I keep meaning to momentarily lay aside my obligations in Perldom and my
particular language preservation projects long enough to bang out an
article on this.  But whenever I think about it, I run into a basic
problem: any language with messy enough morphology and morphophonolgy to
require this approach isn't simple enough to even sketch in an article just
as background to such a parser.
I could make up a toy rule system that would be simple enough to explain
but which would exhibit enough of the problematic situations to justify
this approach.  But I worry that a fictitious example-language would seem
silly to people who understand polysynthesis and implausibly bizarre to
people who don't.  Or am I just being to negative?  I could always just try
it and see.
Thoughts?

--
Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/HKE4lB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->


Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/