Uyghur Stem-Suffix Segmentation and POS-Tagging Based on Functional Suffixes

Abstract

As an agglutinative language, Uyghur has rich functional suffixes. This study is using functional suffixes (including suffix stringes) to define POS inventory for stem-suffix segmentation and word POS-Tagging based on Prof. Litip Tohti's studies on Uyghur generative syntax. To test the feasibility of functional suffix definition system, we conducted stem-suffix segmentation in a big text corpus (270,000 words, without repetition). About 14,100 most frequently used suffix strings generated. The limited number of suffix strings can reflect the feature of huge amount of Uyghur syntactic components. We tag the suffix strings as one unit based on Prof. Litip Tohti's study, and tag the words in corpus based on the suffix instead of the stem. This is a new try, we hope to improve the performance of Uyghur language processing.