Tokenization and Morphological Analysis for Malagasy

The authors present a tokenizer and nite-state morphological analyzer [Beesley and Karttunen 2003] for Malagasy, based primarily on the discussion of Malagasy morphology in Keenan and Polinsky [1998] and Randriamasimanana [1986]. Words in Malagasy are built from roots by means of a variety of morphological operations such as compounding, afxation and reduplication. The authors analyze productive patterns of nominal and verbal morphology, and describe genitive compounding and sufxation for nouns and various derivational processes involving compounding and afxation for verbs. This work offers a computational analysis of Malagasy morphology, and forms the basis of a computational grammar and lexicon of Malagasy within the framework of the PARGRAM project.