The automatic induction of morphological rules

This paper presents a preliminary report on a project in the field of computational morphology The aim of the project is to develop an expert system, modelling the activity of a descriptive linguist, which will provide automatically a de-scription of the word-formation rules in any arbitrarily chosen language, given as data the words of the language and their meanings It hoped that developing such a model will not only provide clearer insights into the workings of morpho-logical analysis but will also result in an expert system containing features which may be fairly original Following a description of the typical problems of morpho-logical description and of the knowledge which the linguist brings to bear in dealing with these, three small experimental systems are described, one aimed at accounting for allomor-phic variation and the other two at the task of segmentation Recent efforts to integrate these have resulted in a system which is beginning to provide descriptions of the form common in the immediately pre-Chomskyan (structuralist) period for restricted morphological data of the type given to students of linguistics as 'morphology problems ' An appen-dix provides condensed versions of the output from this syste