A Rule-based Morphological Analyzer for Murrinh-Patha

Melanie Seiss


Abstract
Resource development mainly focuses on well-described languages with a large amount of speakers. However, smaller languages may also profit from language resources which can then be used in applications such as electronic dictionaries or computer-assisted language learning materials. The development of resources for such languages may face various challenges. Often, not enough data is available for a successful statistical approach and the methods developed for other languages may not be suitable for this specific language. This paper presents a morphological analyzer for Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia. While nouns in Murrinh-Patha only show minimal inflection, verbs in this language are very complex. The complexity makes it very difficult if not impossible to handle data in Murrinh-Patha with statistical, surface-oriented methods. I therefore present a rule-based morphological analyzer built in XFST and LEXC (Beesley and Karttunen, 2003) which can handle the inflection on nouns and adjectives as well as the complexities of the Murrinh-Patha verb.
Anthology ID:
L12-1048
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
751–758
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/184_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Melanie Seiss. 2012. A Rule-based Morphological Analyzer for Murrinh-Patha. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 751–758, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Rule-based Morphological Analyzer for Murrinh-Patha (Seiss, LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/184_Paper.pdf