Webaffix: Discovering Morphological Links on the WWW

Abstract

This paper presents a new language-independent method for finding morphological links between newly appeared words (i.e. absent from reference word lists). Using the WWW as a corpus, the Webaffix tool detects the occurrences of new derived lexemes based on a given suffix, proposes a base lexeme following a standard scheme (such as noun-verb), and then performs a compatibility test on the word pairs produced, using the Web again, but as a source of cooccurrences. The resulting pairs of words are used to build generic morphological databases useful for a number of NLP tasks. We develop and comment an example use of Webaffix to find new noun/verb pairs in French.

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