LatMor: A Latin Finite-State Morphology Encoding Vowel Quantity

• Authors: Uwe Springmann , Helmut Schmid , Dietmar Najock
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

We present the first large-coverage finite-state open-source morphology for Latin (called LatMor) which parses as well as generates vowel quantity information. LatMor is based on the Berlin Latin Lexicon comprising about 70,000 lemmata of classical Latin compiled by the group of Dietmar Najock in theirwork on concordances of Latin authors (see Rapsch and Najock, 1991) which was recently updated by us. Compared to the well-known Morpheus system of Crane (1991, 1998), which is written in the C programming language, based on 50,000 lemmata of Lewis and Short (1907), not well documented and therefore not easily extended, our new morphology has a larger vocabulary, is about 60 to 1200 times faster and is built in the form of finite-state transducers which can analyze as well as generate wordforms and represent the state-of-the-art implementation method in computational morphology. The current coverage of LatMor is evaluated against Morpheus and other existing systems (some of which are not openly accessible), and is shown to rank first among all systems together with the Pisa LEMLAT morphology (not yet openly accessible). Recall has been analyzed taking the Latin Dependency Treebank¹ as gold data and the remaining defect classes have been identified. LatMor is available under an open source licence to allow its wide usage by all interested parties.

Keywords

EN

morphology; finite state methods; Latin; historical linguistics

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2016-02-29

accepted

2016-05-18

online

2016-10-14

Contributors

author

Uwe Springmann

• Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
• Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

author

Helmut Schmid

• Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

author

Dietmar Najock

• Institut für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opli-2016-0019