Morfeus+: Word parsing in Basque beyond morphological segmentation

Abstract

This work describes the formalization of a word structure grammar that represents the complex morphological and morphosyntactic information embedded within the word forms of an agglutinative language (Basque), giving a comprehensive linguistic description of the main morphological phenomena, such as affixation, derivation, and composition, and also taking into account the modeling of both standard and non-standard words. We have identified the relevant issues to be addressed in the representation of such a grammar. We also present the development of Morfeus+, a tool for the analysis of unrestricted texts, testing its applicability and showing that its coverage is wide and robust, allowing the efficient processing of big volumes of data. This paper describes a mature system that has required several person/years and that tries to integrate a rigorous linguistic specification together with more practical implementation matters, such as the appropriate treatment of unknown words in unrestricted texts.