A freely available wide coverage morphological analyzer for English

TLDR

Morphological analysis of English often relies on two‑level processors such as those described by Karttunen and Wittenburg (1983) and Antworth (1990). The authors present a morphological lexicon covering over 317,000 inflected forms derived from more than 90,000 stems. The lexicon is distributed in two formats—a two‑level processor compatible version and a disk‑based database using a UNIX hash table—and includes an X Window tool for maintenance and browsing. The package, which can be integrated into parsers via Lisp and C hooks, is the only freely available English morphological analyzer with very wide coverage.

Abstract

This paper presents a morphological lexicon for English that handle more than 317000 inflected forms derived from over 90000 stems. The lexicon is available in two formats. The first can be used by an implementation of a two-level processor for morphological analysis (Karttunen and Wittenburg, 1983; Antworth, 1990). The second, derived from the first one for efficiency reasons, consists of a disk-based database using a UNIX hash table facility (Seltzer and Yigit, 1991). We also built an X Window tool to facilitate the maintenance and browsing of the lexicon. The package is ready to be integrated into an natural language application such as a parser through hooks written in Lisp and C.To our knowledge, this package is the only available free English morphological analyzer with very wide coverage.