Rapid development of morphological descriptions for full language processing systems

Abstract

I describe a compiler and development environment for feature-augmented two-level morphology rules integrated into a full NLP system. The compiler is optimized for a class of languages including many or most European ones, and for rapid development and debugging of descriptions of new languages. The key design decision is to compose morphophonological and morphosyntactic information, but not the lexicon, when compiling the description. This results in typical compilation times of about a minute, and has allowed a reasonably full, feature-based description of French inflectional morphology to be developed in about a month by a linguist new to the system.