Parser combinators for Tigrinya and Oromo morphology

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

Abstract

We present rule-based morphological parsers in the Tigrinya and Oromo languages, based on a parser-combinator rather than finite-state paradigm. This paradigm allows rapid development and ease of integration with other systems, although at the cost of non-optimal theoretical efficiency. These parsers produce multiple output representations simultaneously, including lemmatization, morphological segmentation, and an English word-for-word gloss, and we evaluate these representations as input for entity detection and linking and humanitarian need detection.