It Would Be Much Easier If WENT Were GOED

It Would Be Much Easier If WENT Were GOED Dan TUFIS Institute for Computer Technique and Informatics 8-10, Miciurin Bd., 71316 Bucharest 1, Romania Tel. 653390, Telex 1189t-icpci-r ABSTRACT The paper proposes a paradigmatic approach to morphological knowledge acquisition. It ad- dresses the problem of learning from examples rules for word-forms analysis and synthesis. These rules, established by generalizing the train- ing data sets, are effectively used by a built-in in- terpreter which acts consequently as a morphological processor within the architecture of a natural language question-answering system. The PARADIGM system has no a priori knowledge which should restrict it to a particular natural lan- guage, but instead builds up the morphological rules based only on the examples provided, be they in Romanian, English, French, Russian, SIo- vak and the like. 1. INTRODUCTION For highly Inflexlonal languages, encoding all word forms Into a word lexicon (declarative mor- phology approach) appears to be a poor solution not only due to a great redundancy (which for some languages is prohibitive (Japplnen,t983)) but also with respect to some theoretical aspects (as for Instance descriptional adequacy (Wehrli,1985)). Within an Inflexional morphology environment (Alshawl, t985), we propose a procedural ap- proach based on automatically acquired flexlo- nlng paradigms. The paradigmatic model is Incorporated Into an experimental system called PARADIGM, which Is Intended to (partially) re- place the acquisition and modelling part of our MORPHO lexicon management system (Tufis,1987a) incorporated by the lURES environ- ment for building natural language applications (Tufts, 1985). tioned motivations. With respect to the second one maybe it is worth saying that when PARA- DIGM lacks appropriate or complete knowledge It is supposed to act the same way a child or a foreign speak partner does. That is, for instance, to say "goed" or "womens" ff the corresponding ir- regularity is unknown. The reason for such a de- cision stems mainly from our attempt to study in parallel with the implementation, the effectiveness of language learning based on Informal examples. From the linguistic engineering point of view, the purpose of the system is stated very pragmati- cally, that is to ease and speed up as much as possible the building of language specific mor- phological knowledge bases without (too much) help from theoretical morphologists, experts on the language concerned. It is not always easy to find appropriate written material, not to speak about human experts, presenting in a rigorous manner (as imposed by computer applications) the rules and peculiarities of word structuring In different languages. PARADIGM was conceived to overcome, at least partially, these difficulties and to provide a handy tool for Immediate verification of specific rules va- lidity. As the general situation is with learning sys- tems, different copies of PARADIGM may be usecl in parallel and finally merge the Individually de- veloped knowledge bases. This Is beneflclaly not only with respect to the development time but also with respect to the linguistic coverage. Architecturally, PARADIGM was Influenced by DISCIPLE ('recuci, 1988) in the sense that the be- havioral dichotomy "apprentice-expert" …

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