A finite-state morphological analyzer for a Lakota HPSG grammar

Christian Curtis

Abstract
This paper reports on the design and implementation of a morphophonological analyzer for Lakota, a member of the Siouan language family. The initial motivation for this work was to support development of a precision implemented grammar for Lakota on the basis of the LinGO Grammar Matrix. A finite-state transducer (FST) was developed to adapt Lakota’s complex verbal morphology into a form directly usable as input to the Grammar Matrix-derived grammar. As the FST formalism can be applied in both directions, this approach also supports generative output of correct surface forms from the implemented grammar. This article describes the approach used to model Lakota verbal morphology using finite-state methods. It also discusses the results of developing a lexicon from existing text and evaluating its application to related but novel text. The analyzer presented here, along with its companion precision grammar, explores an approach that may have application in enabling machine translation for endangered and under-resourced languages.
Anthology ID:
L14-1149
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
541–544
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1216_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christian Curtis. 2014. A finite-state morphological analyzer for a Lakota HPSG grammar. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 541–544, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A finite-state morphological analyzer for a Lakota HPSG grammar (Curtis, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1216_Paper.pdf
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