A Rule-based Morphological Analyzer for Murrinh-Patha

Abstract

Resource development mainly focuses on well-described languages with a large amount of speakers. However, smaller languages may also profit from language resources which can then be used in applications such as electronic dictionaries or computer-assisted language learning materials. The development of resources for such languages may face various challenges. Often, not enough data is available for a successful statistical approach and the methods developed for other languages may not be suitable for this specific language. This paper presents a morphological analyzer for Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia. While nouns in Murrinh-Patha only show minimal inflection, verbs in this language are very complex. The complexity makes it very difficult if not impossible to handle data in Murrinh-Patha with statistical, surface-oriented methods. I therefore present a rule-based morphological analyzer built in XFST and LEXC (Beesley and Karttunen, 2003) which can handle the inflection on nouns and adjectives as well as the complexities of the Murrinh-Patha verb.

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