A constraint-based morphological analyzer for concatenative and non-concatenative morphology of Tagalog verbs

• Main Author: Fortes, Farrah Cherry L.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2002
• Subjects: Grammar; Comparative and general > Morphology; Computer algorithms; Computational linguistics; Programming Languages and Compilers
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/3000
• Institution: De La Salle University

Tagalog verbs exhibit non-concatenative morphology, particularly infixation and reduplication. Morphological analysis in the current governing methods, such as finite-state and unification-based, are predominantly effective for handling concatenative morphology. Some of these techniques can already handle limited non-concatenative phenomena. This thesis presents a new method that handles both concatenative and non-concatenative phenomena for Tagalog verbs, called TagMA (Tagalog Morphological Analyzer). It is predominantly based on Optimality Theory (OT), though two-level morphology rule representation is also applied. Optimality Theory is a phonological approach that is proven effective in handling non-concatenative phenomena. It has been applied for generation process and never been used in morphological analysis. This study explores the possibility of using OT for morphological analysis. The resulting algorithm is able to produce the correct underlying form of a given surface form through a set of rules, and verified by the constraints associated with it. The performance evaluation of TagMA is measured in terms of actual runtime, number of rules, and number of constraints used based on the sample set of Tagalog verbs.