Abstract

A finite transducer that processes Spanish infiectiehal amt derivational morphology is presented. The system handles both generation mid analysis of tens of millions inflected tbrms. Lexical and surface (orthographic) representations of the words are linked by a program that interprets a finite directed graph whose arcs are labelled by n-tuples of strings. Each of about 55,000 base forms requires at let one are in the graph. Representing the inflectiehal and derivational possibilities for these forins imposed an overhead of only about 3000 additional arcs, of which about 2500 represent (phonelogically- predictable) stem allomorphy, so that we pay a stor- age price of about 5% for compiling these forms offline. A simple interpreter for the resulting automa ton processes several hundred words per second on a Sun4.

Citations