Finite-state Description of Semitic Morphology: A Case Study of Ancient Accadian

What it is about

An early description of Akkadian word forms in Koskenniemi's two-level framework. Non-concatenative morphology, where the root consonants are interleaved with vowel patterns, is handled by intersecting two lexicons: one for roots, with the inflectional slots left open, and one for prefixes, inflectional elements and suffixes. The intersection defines the lexical form of each word. About thirty two-level rules, compiled with the TWOL compiler, cover vowel contraction, vowel elision next to laryngeals, assimilation of the t of verbal prefixes to dentals, and vowel shortening. Verbs and nouns are given fixed morphotactic slots (person prefix, root with inflection, gender and number, subjunctive, object suffix). The part read (abstract to section 3) gives no coverage figures.

Ideas

• I1. Two-lexicon intersection for Hebrew verbs: a root lexicon (three consonants, slots open) and a pattern lexicon (binyan vowels and affixes) whose intersection yields the stem. The root list is the missing piece, since macula dict has no roots yet.
• I2. Laryngeal alternations as two-level rules (the paper's elision and vowel-change rules around the laryngeals), tested on weak-root forms from the tools/hbo segmenter.
• I3. A coverage measure: generate verb forms from roots with these rules, and count how many MACULA verb forms are reached, per binyan. The test set would live in tools/macula.

For Mova

I1 goes into The verb. I2 goes into The weak verbs. I3 is a measure in tools/macula, run after a root list exists.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{kataja1988finite,
  title = {{Finite-state Description of Semitic Morphology: A Case Study of Ancient Accadian}},
  author = {Kataja, Laura and Koskenniemi, Kimmo},
  booktitle = {Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 1: International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1988},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C88-1064/}
}

References

4 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Karttunen, Lauri (1986) "D-PATR: A Development Environment for Unification-Based Grammars", Proceedings of COLING '86, Bonn. find
2. Karttunen, L., Koskenniemi, K., Kaplan, R. (1987) "A Compiler for Two-level Phonological Rules". In Tools for Morphological Analysis, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Report No. CSLL87-108. Kay, Martin, [an unpublished paper on Finite-State Aproach to Arabian Morphology at a Symposium on Finite-State Phonology at CSLI in July 1985.] find
3. Koskenniemi, Kirmno (1983) Two-Level Morphology: A General Computational Method for Word-Form Recognition and Production. University of Helsinki, Department of General Linguistics, Publicatiuons, No. 11. find
4. Koskenniemi, Kimmo (1986) "Compilation of Automata from Morphological Two-level rules", Papers from the Fifth Scandinavian Conference of Computational Linguistics. Helsinki, December 11-12, 1985. Department of General Linguistics, Publications, No. 15. )15 find

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