Finite-State Computational Morphology: An Analyzer and Generator for Georgian

229 Pages·2022·6.424 MB·English

by  Irina Lobzhanidze

Irina Lobzhanidze
Finite-State
Computational
Morphology
An Analyzer and Generator for Georgian
Finite-State Computational Morphology
Irina Lobzhanidze
Finite-State Computational
Morphology
An Analyzer and Generator for Georgian
Irina Lobzhanidze
Institute of Linguistic Studies
Ilia State University
Tbilisi, Georgia
ISBN 978-3-030-90247-6 ISBN 978-3-030-90248-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90248-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to my parents for their
love and support.
Preface
Georgian presents a lot of different morphological features and is a highly interest-
ing language for NLP systems, especially from the viewpoint of computational
morphology. Modeling Georgian presents us with an opportunity to adapt and to
test computational techniques, to build applications and to develop interdisciplinary
approaches to languages with rich morphology. This book can be seen as an attempt
to demonstrate how technology can be used for the processing of highly agglutina-
tive language types like Georgian.
This book also brings together most of the work done in Georgian in the last 8
years. It covers the compilation of corpora of Georgian texts and the development
of tools including a tokenizer, a rule-based morphological analyzer, and a generator
of Georgian. The computational model presented here, which is implemented by
means of finite-state technology, specifically lexc and xfst, encodes the morphosyn-
tactic features of Georgian language, while the transducer, which has been tested on
the Georgian Language Corpus, can be used as a component of other NLP applica-
tions for lemmatizing or tagging other resources.
It is also our hope that this book will assist other researchers in advancing their
knowledge of Georgian and, possibly of other Kartvelian languages sharing similar
features, and in using technology for their processing activities.
Oxford, UK Irina Lobzhanidze
December, 2019
vii
Acknowledgments
This work is the result of 8 years of research projects financed by the Shota Rustaveli
National Science Foundation (SRNSF): Projects No. AR/320/4–105/11, Corpus
Annotation and Analysis Software for the Modern Georgian Language, and No.
DP2016_23, Digital Humanities: Digital Epigraphy, Computational Linguistics,
Digital Prosopography. Additional funding was provided by Ilia State University.
Many people have contributed to this book. My special gratitude goes to Dr.
Nino Doborjginidze, who encouraged me to preserve with it from the very begin-
ning, and to Dr. Damana Melikishvili, who contributed a great deal to the develop-
ment of verbal module from a theoretical perspective. I would also like to thank
Irakli Gunia, who has contributed significantly to the online version of the Georgian
Language Corpus (GLC) and to the dictionary of idioms developed since.
I would also like to thank the corpus supervisors: Svetlana Berikashvili, Nato
Bilanishvili, Tsira Khakhviashvili and George Tadumadze, programmer George
Mirianashvili, and many research assistants: S. Abralava, N. Chichikoshvili,
M. Dadunashvili, T. Damenia, M. Damenia, N. Datashvili, N. Donadze,
T. Gavashelishvili, T. Getiashvili, K. Gilashvili, N. Gogichaishvili, M. Ishkhanova,
T. Kalkhitashvili, T. Karosanidze, T. Khubashvili, T. Kitoshvili, L. Kitsmarishvili,
L. Kupreishvili, M. Kvaskhvadze, M. Kvinikadze, E. Kvirkvelia, N. Latibashvili,
I. Lobjanidze, Z. Machavariani, S. Margvelashvili, K. Maridashvili, E. Mdinaradze,
S. Nozadze, M. Rukhadze, L. Sergia, A. Sturua, G. Shubitidze, L. Tetrashvili,
A. Tkebuchava, S. Tumanishvili, and L. Vashakmadze, who contributed extensively
to the project and participated in the testing and development of corpus annotation.
Without their efforts, most of the work described here would not have been possible.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments and suggestions and Geoffrey Gosby, who assisted with the
editing and proofreading of the final manuscript.
ix
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2 The Georgian Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 Alphabet and Phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.1 The Alphabet and Scripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.2 Phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.2.3 Word Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3 Morphosyntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.3.1 Noun Inflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3.2 Adjectival Inflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.3.3 Numeral Inflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.3.4 Pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.3.5 Clitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.3.6 Verbal Inflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.3.7 Adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.3.8 Conjunctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.3.9 Particles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.3.10 Interjections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
3 Computational Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.2 Tokenization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
3.3 The Morphological Analyzer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
3.3.1 The Nominal Lexicon and Replacement Rules . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.3.2 The Adjectival Lexicon and Replacement Rules . . . . . . . . . 139
3.3.3 The Numeral Lexicon and Replacement Rules . . . . . . . . . . 140
3.3.4 The Pronominal Lexicon and Replacement Rules . . . . . . . . 144
3.3.5 The Verbal Lexicon and Replacement Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
xi
xii Contents
3.3.6 The Participial and Verbal Noun Lexicons . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
3.3.7 Closed Word-Classes: Adverbs, Conjunctions,
Particles, Interjections and Postpositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
3.3.8 Abbreviations, Foreign Words and Punctuation Marks . . . . 163
3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
4 Testing and Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.2 Rule Integrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
4.3 Consistency and Ordering of Tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
4.4 Language Coverage Test: Wordlists and Corpus Data . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.4.1 Corpus Compilation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.4.2 Corpus Processing and Markup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
4.4.3 Language Coverage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Appendix A: Morphosyntactic Tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Appendix B: Triggers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Appendix C: Structural Markup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Glosses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
About the Author
Irina Lobzhanidze is Professor of Linguistics at Ilia State University, Georgia,

where she is also the Director of MA program in Applied Linguistics. She received
her PhD in Linguistics from Ilia State University, Georgia. She held visiting
Georgian studies fellow position at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies
(2019–2020). Her main research interests lie in the areas of morphology and syntax,
and their interface. She has worked extensively on developing language processing
tools and resources for Georgian, including the morphological analyzer and genera-
tor of Georgian. She is the Linguistic Coordinator of the Georgian Language Corpus
(GLC), a co-author of the Dictionary of Idioms (2014–2017) and the Principal
Researcher in the construction of the Wardrops’ Collection Online (WCO).
Previously, Irina conducted research on various aspects of Georgian idioms and
degree of their “frozenness.”
xiii