Formalisms for morphographemic description

Abstract

Recently there has been some interest in rule formalisms for describing morphologically significant regularities in orthography of words, largely influenced by the work of Koskenniemi. Various implementations of these rules are possible, but there are some weaknesses in the formalism as it stands. An alternative specification formalism is possible which solves some of the problems. This new formalism can be viewed as a variant of the "pure" Koskenniemi model with certain constraints relaxed. The new formalism has particular advantages for multiple character changes. An interpreter has been implemented for the formalism and a significant subset of English morphographemics has been described, but it has yet to be used for describing other languages.