Computational Nonlinear Morphology: With Emphasis on Semitic Languages

by George Kiraz

By the late 1970s, phonologists, and later morphologists, had departed from a linear approach for describing morphophonological operations to a nonlinear one. Computational models, however, remain faithful to the linear model, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to implement the morphology of languages whose morphology is nonconcatanative. This study aims at presenting a computational system that counters the development in linguistics. It provides a detailed computational analysis of the complex morphophonological phenomena found in Semitic languages based on linguistically motivated models.

Genres: Linguistics

194 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

George A. Kiraz is the founder and director of Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, and the president of Gorgias Press. He earned an MSt in Syriac Studies from Oxford University, and an MPhil and PhD from Cambridge University. He has an extensive list of publications in Syriac studies.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense but comprehensive study of the non-concatenative (or nonlinear) morphology found in Semitic languages -- primarily Arabic and Syriac, but there is some mention of Hebrew as well. The focus is on using Finite State Machines for morphological generation, and the book is definitely more focused on computational linguistic analysis than an NLP perspective. Thus, you will not find much here about stemming or machine learning, word sense disambiguation, or the like.