1 Morphology with or without Affixes The last few years have seen the emergence of several clearly articulated alternative approaches to morphology. One such approach rests on the notion that only stems of the so-called lexical categories (N, V, A) are morpheme "pieces" in the traditional sense—connections between (bundles of) meaning (features) and (bundles of) sound (features). What look like...

Where does word formation information play a role in computational linguistics? Think of information retrieval where the parts of a word might contain the important information. If we want to find information in German on relaxation techniques, we need to look for the verb entspannen 'to relax' as well as for the derived noun Entspannung 'relaxation' and compounds containing Entspannung, such a...

This paper examines two case studies of morpheme-specific reduplication that copy from a syntactic domain larger than root but smaller word, providing an analysis in Cophonologies by Phase (CBP) both phonotactic requirements different processes and the amount structure copied reduplication. The first study comes Guébie (Kru, Ivory Coast), where marks nominalization reciprocals (among others). I...

Language learners encounter numerous opportunities to learn regularities, but need to decide which of these regularities to learn, because some are not productive in their native language. Here, we present an account of rule learning based on perceptual and memory primitives (Endress, Dehaene-Lambertz, & Mehler, Cognition, 105(3), 577-614, 2007; Endress, Nespor, & Mehler, Trends in Cognitive Sc...

We propose an unsupervised training method to guide the learning of Malay derivational morphology from a set of morphological segmentations produced by a naı̈ve morphological analyzer. Using a morphology-based language model, we first estimate the probability of a given segmentation. We train the model with EM to find the segmentation that maximizes the probability of each morpheme. We extract t...

In traditional linguistics, pronouns are divided into two classes: those that can bear word stress, coined “strong”, “full” or “tonal”, and cannot, “weak”, “clitic”, “atonal”. However, in the last decades, research on this topic has shown items generally labeled as clitics far more complex. Somewhere between words affixes, these hybrid linguistic entities challenge both description modeling. As...

Most natural language processing tasks require lexical semantic information. Automated acquisition of this information would thus increase the robustness and portability of NLP systems. This paper describes an acquisition method which makes use of fixed correspondences between derivational affixes and lexical semantic information. One advantage of this method, and of other methods that rely onl...