Analysing Finnish with word lists : The DDI approach to morphology revisited

Morphological lexicons for morphologically complex languages provide good text coverage at the cost of overgeneration, difficulty of modification, and sometimes performance issues. Use of simple, manageable lexicon forms – especially lists – for morphologically complex languages may appear unviable because the number of possible word-forms in a morphologically complex language can be prohibitively high. We created and experimented with a list-based lexicon for a morphologically complex language (Finnish), and compared its coverage with that of a mature morphological analyser on new text in two experimental settings. The observed smallish difference in coverage suggests the viability of using simple and easy-to-modify list-based lexicons as an initial part of morphological analysis, to increase developer control on the vast majority of input tokens.Morphological lexicons for morphologically complex languages provide good text coverage at the cost of overgeneration, difficulty of modification, and sometimes performance issues. Use of simple, manageable lexicon forms – especially lists – for morphologically complex languages may appear unviable because the number of possible word-forms in a morphologically complex language can be prohibitively high. We created and experimented with a list-based lexicon for a morphologically complex language (Finnish), and compared its coverage with that of a mature morphological analyser on new text in two experimental settings. The observed smallish difference in coverage suggests the viability of using simple and easy-to-modify list-based lexicons as an initial part of morphological analysis, to increase developer control on the vast majority of input tokens