Morphological Dictionary - Aligned Morphological Dictionaries

Aligned Morphological Dictionaries

In an aligned morphological dictionary, the correspondence between the surface form and the lexical form of a word is aligned at the character level. Continuing with the previous example, we have:

(h,h) (o,o) (u,u) (s,s) (e,e) (s,), (θ,)

Where θ is the empty symbol and signifies "noun", and signifies "plural".

In the example the left hand side is the surface form (input), and the right hand side is the lexical form (output). This order is used in morphological analysis where a lexical form is generated from a surface form. In morphological generation this order would be reversed.

Formally, if Σ is the alphabet of the input symbols, and is the alphabet of the output symbols, an aligned morphological dictionary is a subset, where:

is the alphabet of all the possible alignments including the empty symbol. That is, an aligned morphological dictionary is a set of string in .