A finite-state morphological grammar of Hebrew

  • Authors:
  • Shlomo Yona;Shuly Wintner

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel;University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

  • Venue:
  • Semitic '05 Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Morphological analysis is a crucial component of several natural language processing tasks, especially for languages with a highly productive morphology, where stipulating a full lexicon of surface forms is not feasible. We describe HAMSAH (HAifa Morphological System for Analyzing Hebrew), a morphological processor for Modern Hebrew, based on finite-state linguistically motivated rules and a broad coverage lexicon. The set of rules comprehensively covers the morphological, morpho-phonological and orthographic phenomena that are observable in contemporary Hebrew texts. Reliance on finite-state technology facilitates the construction of a highly efficient, completely bidirectional system for analysis and generation. HAMSAH is currently the broadest-coverage and most accurate freely-available system for Hebrew.