Implementing a formal model of inflectional morphology

International audienceInflectional morphology as a research topic lies on the crossroads of many linguistic subfields, such as linguistic description, linguistic typology, formal linguistics and computational linguistics. However, the subject itself is tackled with diverse objectives and approaches each time. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a formal model of inflectional morphology capturing typological generalisations that aims at combining efforts made in each subfield giving access to every one of them to valuable methods and/or data that would have been out of range otherwise. We show that both language description and studies in formal morphology and linguistic typology on the one hand, as well as NLP tool and resource development on the other benefit from the availability of such a model and an implementation thereof

DeLex, a freely-avaible, large-scale and linguistically grounded morphological lexicon for German

International audienceWe introduce DeLex, a freely-avaible, large-scale and linguistically grounded morphological lexicon for German developed within the Alexina framework. We extracted lexical information from the German wiktionary and developed a morphological inflection grammar for German, based on a linguistically sound model of inflectional morphology. Although the developement of DeLex involved some manual work, we show that is represents a good tradeoff between development cost, lexical coverage and resource accuracy

The informativeness of linguistic unit boundaries

Contemporary models of structural analysis tend to operate with discrete units at different linguistic levels. There is, however, considerable debate regarding the choice of units and the validity of the cues that guide their demarcation. At the level of grammatical analysis, this debate focuses largely on the status of words vs sub-word units and on the generality of the linguistic properties that mark each type of unit. This paper suggests that the status of a unit type can be evaluated in terms of its informativity A measure of informativity is obtained by assessing the influence that different unit boundary types have on text compressibility. The results obtained from this initial study support a pair of general conclusions. The first is that unit boundaries primarily reflect a statistical structure, and that the typological variability of linguistic cues reflects the fact that they serve a secondary reinforcing function. The second is that word boundaries are the most informative boundary type, and that the demarcation of words provides the most informative description of the regular patterns in a language

Développement d'un lexique morphologique et syntaxique de l'ancien français

International audienceIn this paper we describe our work on the development of a large-scale morphological and syntactic lexicon of Old French for natural language processing. We rely on dictionary and lexical resources, from which the extraction of structured and exploitable information required specific developments. In addition, matching information from these different sources posed difficulties. We provide quantitative information on the resulting lexicon, and discuss its reliability in its current version and the prospects for improvement allowed by the existence of a first version, in particular through the automatic analysis of textual data.Nous décrivons dans cet article notre travail de développement d'un lexique morphologique et syntaxique à grande échelle de l'ancien français pour le traitement automatique des langues. Nous nous sommes appuyés sur des ressources dictionnairiques et lexicales dans lesquelles l'extraction d'informations structurées et exploitables a nécessité des développements spécifiques. De plus, la mise en correspondance d'informations provenant de ces différentes sources a soulevé des difficultés. Nous donnons quelques indications quantitatives sur le lexique obtenu, et discutons de sa fiabilité dans sa version actuelle et des perspectives d'amélioration permises par l'existence d'une première version, notamment au travers de l'analyse automatique de données textuelles

DeLex, a freely-avaible, large-scale and linguistically grounded morphological lexicon for German

International audienceWe introduce DeLex, a freely-avaible, large-scale and linguistically grounded morphological lexicon for German developed within the Alexina framework. We extracted lexical information from the German wiktionary and developed a morphological inflection grammar for German, based on a linguistically sound model of inflectional morphology. Although the developement of DeLex involved some manual work, we show that is represents a good tradeoff between development cost, lexical coverage and resource accuracy

The informativeness of linguistic unit boundaries

This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Pacini Editore