Describing morphological phenomena of modern greek using a unification grammar formalism

摘要

The unification-based formalism, suitable for encoding a wide variety of grammars for computational applications and the linguistic research, can also be applied to the area of computational morphology. The morphological processor, presented in this paper, is based on the PATR II formalism and provides the system with a context-sensitive approach as opposed to the more classical finite state automaton approach. It has been designed as a tool to describe a range of linguistic models, in which unification plays the centrol role. Our software system can be used to describe various morphological phenomena of Modern Greek (and any other highly inflected language) such as inflection, derivation, accentuation, composition, etc. Stored morphological information representing a word, is operationally divided into syntactic and semantic parts and is described in terms of attribute-value pairs. The unification-based formalism provides a unified approach to deal with the stratified levels of linguistic information, namely morphology, syntax and semantics.