Generating Hebrew verb morphology by default inheritance hierarchies

We apply default inheritance hierarchies to generating the morphology of Hebrew verbs. Instead of lexically listing each of a word form’s various parts, this strat-egy represents inflectional exponents as markings associated with the application of rules by which complex word forms are deduced from simpler roots or stems. The high degree of similarity among verbs of different binyanim allows us to for-mulate general rules; these general rules are, however, sometimes overridden by binyan-specific rules. Similarly, a verb’s form within a particular binyan is deter-mined both by default rules and by over-riding rules specific to individual verbs. Our result is a concise set of rules defin-ing the morphology of all strong verbs in all binyanim. We express these rules in KATR, both a formalism for default in-heritance hierarchies and associated soft-ware for computing the forms specified by those rules. As we describe the rules, we point out general strategies for express-ing morphology in KATR and we discuss KATR’s advantages over ordinary DATR for the representation of morphological systems.