[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Wayne Leman wrote:

>UNLESS, of course, we use some fuzzy logic, or spelled-something-like
>programming, and/or programming code similar to what is in some
>e-dictionaries for English and other major languages where the user simply
>*begins* typing in the word desired and the program starts displaying all
>possible spellings as soon as, say, the user has typed in five letters.
>

In theory, this would be possible using the Xerox tools (see Bill
Poser's and my earlier emails).  What one would do is to dump all
possible wordforms to a file, then load them into a letter trie (a
common computing data structure).  Lookup would then be possible (and
fast) beginning with the first letter of the typed-in word.  I don't
know, but I suspect email programs (like Outlook Express and Mozilla) do
something like this when you start to type in an address on the "To:" line.

Unfortunately, the Xerox tools as implemented enforce a limit on how
many forms can be dumped at once.  I'm not sure exactly what the limit
is, but I suspect it's a few hundred forms.  So in practice, you can't
do what I describe above.  (And of course for an agglutinative or
polysynthetic language, this could well be impractical anyway.
Compounding would also be problematic.)

If "your" language is not quite so morphologically complex, it would be
possible to create a list of all the wordforms generatable from your
dictionary, by cycling over all the possible combinations of stems and
affixes, and then applying the phonological (or graphemic) rules to the
resulting forms.  This would require some fairly sophisticated
programming (e.g. you have to implement blocking to avoid generating
incorrect regular forms where irregular forms exist), but is in
principle doable (again, I emphasize, given the right kind of morphology!)

    Mike Maxwell



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