Formal analysis of Akkadian morphology

In recent years we can witness tendencies to process electronically not only living languages, but also ancient languages. This trend has also its impact on the sphere of Semitic languages as well. My thesis deals with the situation at Akkadian language. The extent of this thesis does not allow to solve the issue of automatic morphological analysis - however, it is possible to specify the morphological model of the Akkadian language with regard to use of the defined categories and their values in tagging of Akkadian. When processing Akkadian electronically we need to face several important issues. Since Akkadian is a dead language, it is not possible to gather information from native speakers, we have to depend fully on written sources. The first problem is the written text itself - it needs to be transliterated from a cuneiform script, which was not originally mentioned for a Semitic language. Further we need to solve the issue of defining the word boundaries, so that we could proceed to the morphologic analysis and tagging. Last but not least we have to deal with phonetic changes in such cases as assimilation, dissimilation, contraction etc. In the practical part of the thesis I suggested a tagset and used it for tagging of cca 60 lines of the original Akkadian text from the preface to Hammurabi's Code...