An Affix Stripping Morphological Analyzer for Turkish

This paper presents the design and the implementation of a morphological analyzer for Turkish. A new methodology is proposed for doing the analysis of Turkish words with an affix stripping approach and without using any lexicon. The rule-based and agglutinative structure of the language allows Turkish to be modeled with finite state machines (FSMs). In contrast to the previous works, in this study, FSMs are formed by using the morphotactic rules in reverse order. This paper describes the steps of this new methodology including the classification of the suffixes, the generation of the FSMs for each suffix class and their unification into a main machine to cooperate in the analysis.