On the generative power of two-level morphological rules

  • Authors:
  • Graeme Ritchie

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

  • Venue:
  • EACL '89 Proceedings of the fourth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Koskenniemi's model of two-level morphology has been very influential in recent years, but definitions of the formalism have generally been phrased in terms of a compilation (sometimes left unspecified) into a form of finite-state transducers, or else have consisted of an informal outline of the intended interpretation of the rule-formalism itself. Analyses of the properties of the formalism have generally focussed on the transducer mechanism. It is, however, possible to give a fully formal definition of the original rule notation directly, in a way which reflects Koskenniemi's original informal characterisation and which does not depend directly on the notion of a transducer (although it must retain the essential nature of parts of the notation as being regular expressions). This re-formulation allows a proof that the ability of this formalism to characterise mappings between strings is more limited than that of arbitrary transducers.