Generating Hebrew Verb Morphology by Default Inheritance Hierarchies

What it is about

The authors generate the forms of Hebrew strong verbs with a default inheritance hierarchy, written in KATR (a DATR-style formalism with its own software). Instead of listing every form, the network stores general rules at the binyan nodes (qal, pi'el, hiphil, niphal, pual, hophal, hithpael, seven in all) and lets binyan-specific rules override them; a verb's own node supplies its root consonants by "priming". Exceptions, such as the third-person masculine singular perfect of pi'el, are handled by specialising rules, and a postprocessing stage handles guttural letters. The result is a compact rule set that yields all perfect and imperfect forms of strong verbs. The paper reports no corpus measurement; it names the weak verbs, the waw-consecutive, the infinitive, the imperative and the noun suffixes as further work.

Ideas

• I1. Store the binyan layer of Mova's segmenter tables as defaults with overrides: a default prefix/vowel pattern per binyan, and a short list of overriding rules (pi'el doubling, the 3ms perfect exception). When a token is split, record which default or override fired, so the segmentation can say why.
• I2. Generate all perfect and imperfect forms of a list of strong verbs from their roots (roots still have to come from a source; macula dict has no roots yet), strip the points, and check that tools/hbo recovers each lexeme. The list of failures is a gap list for the lex and pre tables.
• I3. Guttural letters as a finite table of vowel substitutions applied after the main derivation, rather than inside the rules. Mova can do the same as a small table of post-rules, with each rule named.

For Mova

I1 goes into The verb (binyanim) and the prefix tables of tools/hbo. I2 is a test for tools/hbo, with the generator's output used only as a test set. I3 goes into Phonology of Biblical Hebrew. The KATR software itself is not reused; the idea is a set of finite rules in Rust.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1118637.1118639

@inproceedings{finkel2002generating,
  title = {{Generating Hebrew Verb Morphology by Default Inheritance Hierarchies}},
  author = {Finkel, Raphael and Stump, Gregory},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL-02 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.3115/1118637.1118639},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1118637.1118639}
}

References

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

1. Greville G. Corbett and Norman M. Fraser. 1993. Network Morphology: A DATR account of Russian nominal inflection. Journal of Linguistics, 29:113–142. find
2. P. T. Daniels. 1993. The Unicode Consortium: The Unicode standard. Language: journal of the Linguistic Society of America, 69(1):225–225, March. find
3. Roger Evans and Gerald Gazdar. 1989. Inference in DATR. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 66–71, Manchester. find
4. Raphael Finkel, Lei Shen, Gregory Stump, and Suresh Thesayi. 2002. KATR: A set-based extension of DATR. under review. find
5. Norman M. Fraser and Greville G. Corbett. 1995. Gender, animacy, and declensional class assignment: a unified account for Russian. In G. Booij and J. van Marle, editors, Yearbook of Morphology 1994, pages 123–150. Kluwer, Dordrecht. find
6. Norman M. Fraser and Greville G. Corbett. 1997. Defaults in Arapesh. Lingua, 103:25–57. find
7. Lauri Karttunen. 1993. Finite-state constraints. In John Goldsmith, editor, The Last Phonological Rule. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. find
8. Alan S. Prince and Paul Smolensky. 1993. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Technical Report RuCCs Technical Report #2, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, Piscataway, NJ. find
9. Gregory T. Stump. 2001. Inflectional morphology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. find

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