Feature Structures, Unification and Finite-State Transducers

We present a new framework for describing morphological models which combines several types of descriptions in a single unified declarative language: simple morphological rules relate strings to feature structures; rules can be grouped into inheritance hierarchies of paradigms; rules can be composed for describing simple agglutinative morphology; they can also be combined to describe more complex morphotactic structures. Rules are compiled as extended finite-state transducers where left projections are characters and right projections are feature structures: unification is used instead of concatenation to compute the output of a transduction.