Somali NLP Grammar

Finite state and Constraint Grammar based analysers, proofing tools and other resources

View the project on GitHub giellalt/lang-som

Somali morphological analyser

INTRODUCTION TO THE MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSER OF SOMALI.

Multichar_Symbols definitions

Analysis symbols

The morphological analyses of Somali wordforms are presented in this system in terms of the following symbols. (It is highly suggested to follow existing standards when adding new tags).

The parts-of-speech are:

Fusional adpositions

Object pronouns in adpositional+pronoun

Focus

The parts of speech are further split up into:

Verb and noun declensions for the analysers that want to know about that NOTE: We probably do not want to thag these, this is morphological and not morphosyntactic info. t.

The Usage extents are marked using the following tags:

The nominals are inflected in the following case, number

Nominals also are inflected for gender

Nominal marked for gender undergo gender polarity changes in plural. We want to mark +Masc and +Fem, such that disambiguation is easier, but knowing the gender of the lemma since it is not predictable from a given plural form is a good thing.

Nominals also have affixed demonstratives

Are these in use?

The possession is marked as such:

The comparative forms are:

Numerals are classified under:

Verb moods are:

Verb tenses

Verb aspects are:

Verb personal forms are (NB: no inclusive/exclusive):

Verbs also mark some non-agreement syntactic information

Other verb forms are

Abbreviated words are classified with:

Special symbols are classified with:

The verbs are syntactically split according to transitivity:

Special multiword units are analysed with:

Non-dictionary words can be recognised with:

Question and Focus particles:

Semantics are classified with

Derivations are classified under the morphophonetic form of the suffix, the source and target part-of-speech.

Syntaxy stuff, don’t want to use +Acc, because this isn’t relevant in nouns

Nominal MSP

Derivation

Clitics

Style

Morphophonology

To represent phonologic variations in word forms we use the following symbols in the lexicon files:

Going to try to replace these with flag diacritics if possible.

And following triggers to control variation

TODO: no need for , but needs to be removed in all files

Tone

Symbols that need to be escaped on the lower side (towards twolc):

Flag diacritics

We have manually optimised the structure of our lexicon using following flag diacritics to restrict morhpological combinatorics - only allow compounds with verbs if the verb is further derived into a noun again: | @P.NeedNoun.ON@ | (Dis)allow compounds with verbs unless nominalised | @D.NeedNoun.ON@ | (Dis)allow compounds with verbs unless nominalised | @C.NeedNoun@ | (Dis)allow compounds with verbs unless nominalised

For languages that allow compounding, the following flag diacritics are needed to control position-based compounding restrictions for nominals. Their use is handled automatically if combined with +CmpN/xxx tags. If not used, they will do no harm. | @P.CmpFrst.FALSE@ | Require that words tagged as such only appear first | @D.CmpPref.TRUE@ | Block such words from entering ENDLEX | @P.CmpPref.FALSE@ | Block these words from making further compounds | @D.CmpLast.TRUE@ | Block such words from entering R | @D.CmpNone.TRUE@ | Combines with the next tag to prohibit compounding | @U.CmpNone.FALSE@ | Combines with the prev tag to prohibit compounding | @P.CmpOnly.TRUE@ | Sets a flag to indicate that the word has passed R | @D.CmpOnly.FALSE@ | Disallow words coming directly from root.

Use the following flag diacritics to control downcasing of derived proper nouns (e.g. Finnish Pariisi -> pariisilainen). See e.g. North Sámi for how to use these flags. There exists a ready-made regex that will do the actual down-casing given the proper use of these flags. | @U.Cap.Obl@ | Allowing downcasing of derived names: deatnulasj. | @U.Cap.Opt@ | Allowing downcasing of derived names: deatnulasj.

Person flags

The continuation lexica

The word forms in Somali start from the lexeme roots of basic word classes, or optionally from prefixes:

The following are coming from som-lex.txt

These lexica are dummy lexical to make the source compile, they contain only #.

This (part of) documentation was generated from src/fst/morphology/root.lexc

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