User:Firespeaker/Steps for writing a morphological transducer
This is a short guide....
This outlines steps that should be followed more or less in order; however, it can be an iterative process, and sometimes you need to go ahead a step or two to figure out what you did wrong or missed a couple steps back.
Contents
Document Resources
Document Morphotactics
Phonology
with clear rules for any condition, documenting variation
Word classes
Not just nouns/verbs/adjectives/etc., but types of these, how they pattern
Decide what the best formalism is
Start writing morphophonology
Add some nouns
Add some noun morphology
For example, plural. Where do cases come in relation to plural?
Add some verbs
Add some verbal morphology
For example, simple present tense.
Figure out more complex categories
Major evaluation
You should be evaluating all along, but at this point stop and do a major evaluation. Run your transducer over several large corpora (if available). What's missing? Major chunks of morphology? Some common words? Try to fill these in, and your coverage should jump by several percent.
Expand coverage
Tweak morphophonology
Add lexemes in bulk
based on frequency lists, words in a corpus not covered, things that occur to you off the top of your head
