The authors present a tokenizer and finite-state morphological analyzer (Beesley and Karttunen 2003) for Malagasy, based primarily on the discussion of Malagasy morphology in Keenan and Polinsky (1998) and Randriamasimanana (1986). Words in Malagasy are built from roots by means of a variety of morphological operations such as compounding, affixation and reduplication. The authors analyze productive patterns of nominal and verbal morphology, and describe genitive compounding and suffixation for nouns and various derivational processes involving compounding and affixation for verbs. This work offers a computational analysis of Malagasy morphology, and forms the basis of a computational grammar and lexicon of Malagasy within the framework of the PARGRAM project.
['Mary Dalrymple', 'Maria Liakata', 'Lisa Mackie']
Tokenization and Morphological Analysis for Malagasy