Computational Nonlinear Morphology

By the late 1970s, phonologists, and later morphologists, had departed from a linear approach for describing morphophonological operations to a nonlinear one. Computational models, however, remain faithful to the linear model, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to implement the morphology of languages whose morphology is non concatanative. Computational Nonlinear Morphology aims at presenting a computational system that counters the development in linguistics. It provides a detailed computational analysis of the complex morphophonological phenomena found in Semitic languages that is based on linguistically motivated models.

The bookoutlines a new generalized regular rewrite rule system that uses multitape finite-state automata to cater for root-and-pattern morphology, infixation, circumfixation, and other complex operations such as the broken plural derivation problem found in Arabic and Ethiopic.