Abstract

Introduction The recent work in statistical parsing (Church 1988, Schabes 1991) and statistical machine translation (Brown et al 1990) calls the traditional rule-based view of grammar into question. These authors emphasize that grammatical rule systems aiming at syntax-directed translation, and even rule systems aimed at the description of a single language, break down when faced with the actual complexity of natural language data. In fact, under realistic testing conditions the "example-based" or "corpusbased " systems that employ some general-purpose optimization algorithm in order to extract statistical regularities from the data fare just as well as the rule-based systems in which the regularities are extracted beforehand by the grammarian. In the light of these facts it is natural to extend the inquiry to morphology and ask how statistical morphological systems that exploit the frequency information in the data will compare with rule-based morphological sy

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