Курсы машинного перевода для языков России/Session 1

This session has two objectives, the first is to give an overview of the theory of morphology, how words are inflected and how new words are formed. And the second is to demonstrate how the analysis and generation of morphology is dealt with in Apertium.

Theory

The theory section is split into three subsections: The first deals with morphotactics, that is how morphemes (parts of words) occur and are joined together. The second gives some details of morphophonology, or how changes in morphemes happen as a result of them being joined together. The final section covers a theoretical description of how this is treated with computers.

Morphotactics

The morphotactics of a language is the way that morphemes in that language are joined together to form words. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning. Morphemes can be free, or bound. They are free if they can occur on their own, and bound if they must be connected to another word. A single morpheme may have several allomorphs which mean the same thing but are written or spoken differently. For example the dative case (used to indicate movement in the direction of) in Chuvash has several allomorphs, which change depending on the vowel quality of the stem to which it attaches.

aчама ача·м·а "to my child"

ачамсене ача·м·сен·е "to my children"

уӗҫӗме уӗҫ·ӗм·е "to my street"

Morphemes can be further split into two subtypes, inflectional and derivational. In the two examples above, signifies a derivational boundary, and + signifies an inflectional boundary.

TODO; something about derivation here

Inflection

Inflectional morphemes carry grammatical information, such as number, case, tense, etc. but do not change the word category (part of speech), nor do they change the basic semantic meaning. For example in Spanish, fácil and fáciles have the same basic semantic meaning, but if you add the derivational affix -mente, fácilmente then the meaning changes to "in a manner which is fácil".

Examples of inflectional morphemes might be the -lar, -сен and -и plurals (kitaplar ^(tr), ачасен ^(cv), книги ^(ru)), and case endings -ран (ablative), -kor (temporal), and -eh (locative): уй+ран ^(cv), öt+kor(hu), vas+eh(sl))

In translation, inflection is very frequently treated as a productive process, meaning there are rules to determine how the different inflections of a word change in translation.

Derivation

Derivational morphemes change the basic semantic meaning of a word, and can also change word category. Depending on the language pair involved, derivation is usually treated less than inflectional morphology, as the semantic changes caused by derivational morphemes can be more unpredictable.

Some examples of derivations might be -DAKi in Turkish and -ja in Finnish (Makedonya'+daki, kirjoa+ja).