Russian Word Prediction with Morphological Support

A co-operative project between two research groups in Tbilisi and Stockholm began in 1996. Its purpose is to extend a word predictor developed by the Swedish partner to the Russian language. Since Russian is much richer in morphological forms than the 7 languages previously worked with, an additional morphological component, using an algorithm supplied by the group in Tbilisi, is seen as necessary. It will provide inflectional categories and resulting inflections for verbs, nouns and adjectives. The correct word forms can then be presented to the user of the word prediction system in a consistent manner, allowing the user to easily choose the desired inflectional word form. At present, the work with the classification of verbs is complete. The algorithm is also being used to automatically tag the large lexicon used in the word predictor with inflectional classes.