Linguistics Discussion 2013 and Beyond discussion

Morphology, the study of the structure of words, best fits under this topic of phonetics and grammar. Every word is broken up into small units called morphemes, as every sentence is broken up into phrases and clauses (which we should also have a topic for in here at some point). For instance the word unhappiness is one word. Yet it contains three morphemes. The affixes un and ness and the root word 'happy'.

I enjoyed Katamba a lot and re-read it.
Computational Linguists tend to use the Porter stemmer. There has been a European project called Snowball to build stemmers in multiple languages. I have downloaded this code and used it in my own programs.
However, Porter often produces strange stems like "electriciti", I think because this approach returned a lot of hits in the early days of Document Retrieval when processing power was limited. Nowadays I prefer to strip suffixes off myself speculatively, then to check against the POS dictionary of Wordnet, as to whether these exist. I have never stripped off prefixes since Wordnet seems to have separate lexical entries for the high frequency ones.
I have written experimental code to recognize "made-up" trade names like "Spinvox" or "Scotchbright". You really need a Latin dictionary to cover all the possibilities.

Morphology

John wrote: "I enjoyed Katamba a lot and re-read it.
Computational Linguists tend to use the Porter stemmer. There has been a European project called Snowball to build stemmers in multiple languages. I have dow..."

Sounds incredibly useful I've added it to my too read shelf. Thanks John!

Jonathan,
You are welcome. I think it is the only book on Morphology that I have read, apart from Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language". Katamba has a lot of African examples, if I remember correctly, and Deutscher has a lot on Semitic verb frames which appear to be a very extreme case. (He covers English syntax too.) English seems to be a lot easier compared to African and Semitic. Since my aim is just to write programs, to treat English, I tend to skip over the more elaborate morphological examples.

John wrote: "Jonathan,
You are welcome. I think it is the only book on Morphology that I have read, apart from Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language". Katamba has a lot of African examples, if I r..."

I'll let you know more when I've got around to reading the book. At the moment most of my time will have to be devoted to pure linguistic and educational theories...