Morphological Synthesizer for Ge'ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations

What it is about

A rule-based synthesizer generates Ge'ez verb forms in Ge'ez script from infinitive stems, using two-level morphology. It forms five stems per tense-mood, then the TAM forms, then person-number-gender suffixes and object suffixes. A stem classifier marks a verb irregular when it contains a guttural (ሀ ሐ ኀ አ ዐ) or a semi-vowel (የ ወ). The test set is 1,102 sample verbs taken from grammar books and the Bible, not a held-out corpus. Experts checked the output by error counting: 99.6% for regular verbs (7,577 words), 96.6% for irregular verbs (19,290 words), 97.4% overall, against 96.28% for an earlier Afan Oromo verb system. The error analysis names exceptional stems, concatenation exceptions and missing rules. The figures are not internally consistent: 8 errors in 7,577 words is about 99.9%, not 99.6%, and 8 + 661 is 669, not the stated 668. Treat the split with care.

Ideas

• I1. Test the letter-class rule on data. The paper calls a verb irregular when it contains a guttural or semi-vowel. Check this on MACULA Hebrew verbs: how many forms change class under the rule, and do the weak-root verbs fall into the irregular set? See The weak verbs.
• I2. Split every score by class, as the paper does for regular and irregular verbs, and state the mix of the test set. A single overall figure depends on that mix, as the authors themselves say.
• I3. Compile boundary changes to a transducer. The boundary handler (suffixes change the last letter of stems ending in ቀ, ከ or ገ) is a finite-state rule. The lex and pre tables in tools/hbo could compile the same kind of rule to an FST, with the paper's error list kept as a regression set.

For Mova

I1 is a class test on The weak verbs with MACULA data. I2 is the reporting format for verb tests in tools/macula compare. I3 is for tools/hbo (segmenter tables).

Cite

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

@inproceedings{gidey2024morphological,
  title = {{Morphological Synthesizer for Ge'ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations}},
  author = {Gidey, Gebrearegawi Gebremariam and Teklehaymanot, Hailay Kidu and Atsbha, Gebregewergs Mezgebe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.rail-1.11/}
}

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