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<Paper uid="E95-1028">
  <Title>Rapid Development of Morphological Descriptions for Full Language Processing Systems</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="207" end_page="208" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusions and Further Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The rule formalism and compiler described here work well for European languages with reasonably complex orthographic changes but a limited range of possible affix combinations. Development, compilation and run-time efficiency are quite acceptable, and the use of rules containing complex feature-augmented categories allows morphotactic behaviours and non-segmentM spelling constraints to be specified in a way that is perspicuous to linguists, leading to rapid development of descriptions adequate for full NLP.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The kinds of non-linear effects common in Semitic languages, where vowel and consonant patterns are interpolated in words (Kay, 1987; Kiraz, 1994) could be treated efficiently by the mechanisms described here if it proved possible to define a representation that allowed the parts of an inflected word corresponding to the root to be separated fairly cleanly from the parts expressing the inflection. The latter could then be used by a modified version of the current system as the basis for efficient lookup of spelling patterns which, as in the current system, would allow possible lexical roots to be calculated.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Agglutinative languages could be handled ef- null flciently by the current mechanism if specifications were provided for the affix combinations that were likely to occur at all often in real texts. A backup mechanism could then be provided which attempted a slower, but more complete, direct application of the rules for the rarer cases.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The interaction of morphological analysis with spelling correction (Carter, 1992; Oflazer, 1994; Bowden, 1995) is another possibly fruitful area of work. Once the root spelling patterns and the affix combinations pointing to them have been created, analysis essentially reduces to an instance of affixstripping, which would be amenable to exactly the technique outlined by Carter (1992). As in that work, a discrimination net of root forms would be required; however, this could be augmented independently of spelling pattern creation, so that the flexibility resulting from not composing the lexicon with the spelling rules would not be lost.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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