Inflectional morphology synthesis for Bengali noun, pronoun and verb systems

Abstract

Morphological synthesis is an essential part of any natural language generation system. bengali is a highly inflectional language with more than 160 different inflected forms for verbs and 36 different forms for nouns, and 24 different forms for pronouns. Moreover, the choice and ordering of suffixes for nouns and structural changes in verb morphology are dependent on the type (animate/inanimate etc) and syllable structure of the root respectively. We describe here a rulebased approach for Bengali morphological synthesis. For nouns and pronouns, the synthesis engine selects the appropriate suffixes, determines the ordering among them, and concatenates them according to the rules. The verb roots have been classified under 19 categories based on the syllable structure. An FSM is used to recognize the category of the root. Thereafter, a simple algorithm generates the inflected form of the verb based on suffix table and rule tables for the classes. Several natural language processing (NLP) activities on Indian languages being carried out in our institute require robust natural language generation (NLG). Iconic communication system which synthesizes valid bengali sentences that can be used for communication, given the input of a