- Kemal Oflazer. 2012. 12 MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS. Abstract: In the previous chapters, we have seen that a lot of information about the potential tags of tokens in a text is found by lexicon lookup. Another, often complementary source of information is morphological analysis, i.e. the process of decomposing words into their constituents. The information about the individual constituents can be used to determine the necessary information about the word as a whole. Such information may range from basic wordclass information assigned from a fixed inventory of tags to structural information consisting of the relationships between components of the word further annotated with various features and their values (cf. Chapter 10). The English word "redness" could thus either be analysed as having the tag NN (singular noun) hiding its internal details, or be analysed by a suitable word grammar to have the structureAdj (red) + N (+ness) where the internal structure of the word has been made explicit. This chapter will present issues in implementing morphological analysers to be used in wordclass tagging or other natural language processing activities, such as syntactic parsing, speech recognition, text-to-speech, spelling checking and correction, document indexing and retrieval. The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to provide a detailed coverage of various aspects of computational morphology; the reader is referred to several recent books covering this topic (see e.g. Sproat (1992) for a quite comprehensive treatment of computational morphology and Ritchie et al. (1992) for a description of a morphological analyser and lexicon for English). Instead, after
