Knowledge- and Labor-Light Morphological Analysis

We describe a knowledge and labor-light system for morphological analysis of fusional languages, exemplified by analysis of Czech. Our approach takes the middle road between completely unsupervised systems on the one hand and systems with extensive manually-created resources on the other. For the majority of languages and applications neither of these extreme approaches seems warranted. The knowledge-free approach lacks precision and the knowledge- intensive approach is usually too costly. We show that a system using a little knowledge can be effective. This is done by creating an open, flexible, fast, portable system for morphological analysis. Time needed for adjusting the system to a new language constitutes a fraction of the time needed for systems with extensive manually created resources: days instead of years. We tested this for Russian, Portuguese and Catalan.The work described in this paper was partially supported by NSF CAREER Award 0347799