Yhdyssanojen kuvaaminen suomen kielessä

In Finnish language one is able to construct compound words with several consecutive individual words. Most compound words are constructed using nouns. However, many other types of compounds can also be constructed. Finnish differs from many other languages in that while, for example in English, many concepts are formed using multi-word expressions, in Finnish such concepts are formed using compound words, that is, words glued together. The description of such constructs is challenging, because the number of compound words is almost limitless. Yet each compound word occurring in text should be described and translated. Although the languages, such as Finnish and English, differ in describing multi- component concepts, in description we meet the same problems in both languages. In English, which uses mostly multi-word expression, these word clusters are handled after the analysis process. In Finnish, which uses mostly word compounds, the description must be done already in the word analysis. This report handles the method of describing Finnish word compounds in a way, where the coverage of the words and the limited capacity of the analyser are taken into account