Morphology and Computation

This book provides the first broad yet thorough coverage of issues in
morphological theory. It includes a wide array of techniques and systems in
computational morphology (including discussion of their limitations), and describes
some unusual applications.Sproat motivates the study of computational morphology by
arguing that a computational natural language system, such as a parser or a
generator, must incorporate a model of morphology. He discusses a range of
applications for programs with knowledge of morphology, some of which are not
generally found in the literature. Sproat then provides an overview of some of the
basic descriptive facts about morphology and issues in theoretical morphology and
(lexical) phonology, as well as psycholinguistic evidence for human processing of
morphological structure. He takes up the basic techniques that have been proposed
for doing morphological processing and discusses at length various systems (such as
DECOMP and KIMMO) that incorporate part or all of those techniques, pointing out the
inadequacies of such systems from both a descriptive and a computational point of
view. He concludes by touching on interesting peripheral areas such as the analysis
of complex nominals in English, and on the main contributions of Rumelhart and
McClelland's connectionism to the computational analysis of words.