Adapting an English Morphological Analyzer for French

ADAPTING AN ENGLISH MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYZER FOR FRENCH Roy J. Byrd and Evelyne Tzoukermann IBM Research IBM q~omas J. Watson Research Center Yorktown lleights, New York 10598 ABSTRACT A word-based morphological analyzer and a dic- tionary for recognizing inflected forms of French words have been built by adapting the UDICI" system. We describe the adaptations, emphasiz- ing mechanisms developed to handle French verbs. This work lays the groundwork for doing French derivational morphology and morphology for other languages. 1. Introduction. UDICT is a dictionary system intended to sup- port the lexical needs of computer programs that do natural language processing (NLP). Its t'u-st version was built for English and has been used in several systems needing a variety of informa- tion about English words (Heidorn, et a1.(1982), Sowa(1984), McCord(1986), and Neff and Byrd(1987)). As described in Byrd(1986), UDICT provides a framework for supplying syn- tactic, semantic, phonological, and morphological information about the words it contains. Part of UDICT's apparatus is a morphological analysis subsystem capable of recognizing morphological variants of the words who~ lemma forms are stored in UDICT's dictionary. The English version of this analyzer has been de- scribed in Byrd(1983) and Byrd, et al. (1986) and allows UDICT to recognize inflectionally and derivationally affixed words, compounds, and collocations. The present paper describes an ef- fort to build a French version of UDICT. It briefly discusses the creation of the dictionary data itself and then focuses on issues ,raised in handling French inflectional morphology. 2. The Dictionary. The primary role of the dictionary in an NLP system is to store and retrieve information about words, in order for NLP systems to be effective, their dictionaries must contain a lot of informa- tion about a lot of words. Chodorow, et al.(1985) and Byrd, et al.(1987) discuss techniques for building dictionaries with the required scope by extracting lexical information from machine- readable versions of published dictionaries. Be- sides serving the NLP application, some of the lexicai information supports that part of the dic- tionary's access mechanism which permits recog- nition of morphological variants of the stored words. We have build a UDICT dictionary con- taining such morphological information for French by starting with an existing spelling cor- rection and synonym aid dictionary ~ and by add- ing words and information from the French-English dictionary in Collins(1978). French UDICT contains a data base of over 40,000 lemmata which are stored in a direct access file managed by the Dictionary Access Method (Byrd, et al. (1986)). Each entry in this file has one of the lemmata as its key and contains lexical information about that lemma. Other than the word's part-of-speech, this information is repres- ented as binary features and multi-valued attri- butes. The feature information relevant for inflectional analysis includes the following: (1) features : part -of-speech singular plural mascullne feminine We are grateful to the Advanced Language Development group of Maryland, for aocess to their French lexical materials. Those materials parts-of-speech and paradigm classes. IBM's Application Systems Division in Bethesda, include initial …

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