Morphological Analysis of Inflective Languages through Generation

A crucial problem in development of systems for automatic morphological analysis for inflective languages is the treatment of stem alternations. The existing models require development of the corresponding rules that specify what stems can be generated from a given one. Many of such rules (e.g., for Russian about a thousand) do not have any reasonable linguistic interpretation. We suggest a method that avoids the use of such rules by generating and verifying the hypotheses about possible grammatical forms. The methods of such type are known as analysis through generation; they make the system development much simpler than the standard direct approach. A morphological analysis and generation system for Russian developed with our method is freely available for academic use; a Spanish system is being implemented.