Course Learning Objectives

During this course, it is expected that students will gain mastery of the following concepts and goals.

Linguistic foundations underlying computational morphology

• Phonetics and phonology, including:
  • International phonetic alphabet
  • Place and manner of articulation
  • Voicing
  • Conditional rewrite rules
  • Phonological alternation
  • Relationship to morphology
• Morphology, including:
  • Relationships with phonology and syntax
  • Morphological typology, including:
    • Fusion
    • Agglutination
    • Polysynthesis
  • Types of morphemes, including:
    • Roots
    • Inflectional morphemes
    • Derivational morphemes
    • Templatic morphemes
  • Affix types:
    • Prefixes
    • Suffixes
    • Infixes
    • Circumfixes
• Grammatical features, including:
  • Case
  • Mood
  • Valence
  • Person
  • Number
• Leipzig glossing conventions

Mathematical foundations underlying computational morphology

• Set theory, including:
  • Definitions and ways to specifiy and visualize sets
  • Algebra of sets, including
    • Union, intersection, difference, complement
    • Power sets
    • Empty set and universal set
    • Finite and infinite sets
    • Basic laws and properties of sets
• Relations and functions, including:
  • Definitions
  • Identity relation
  • Complement and inverse
  • Finite vs infinite relations
  • Projection
  • Composition

Formal language theory foundations underlying computational morphology

• Definitions of and relationship between language, grammar, and automata
• Regular languages and regular expressions
• Finite state automata
  • Finite state acceptors
  • Finite state transducers
  • Finite state diagrams and visualization conventions

Computational morphology finite-state toolkits

• XFST, Foma, and HFST
• XFST-style REPL and rules file format, including:
  • Regular expressions
  • Operators
  • Replacement rules
  • Compiling to FST and binary formats
  • Upper and lower sides
• Lexicon and the lexc file format, including:
  • Multicharacter symbols
  • Continuation classes
  • Flag diacritics
• Two-level formalism and file format

Implementation of finite-state morphological analyzer / generator

• Read and understand a reference grammar of a language
• Implement the lexicon and rules of the language as an FST
• Verify and test the coverage of the FST
• Applications of computational morphology

Machine learning of morphology

• SIGMORPHON and current research
• Bootstrapping from finite-state systems