Morphology, analogy and machine translation
following straightforward questions: "What domain of linguistic knowledge is dealt within this work?", "How are these phenomena approached from a formal standpoint?" and"What for?". They thus define the three main axes around which the presentinterdisciplinary investigation revolves: main topic, methodology and intended purpose orrange of application. Topic apart, methodology and purpose are strongly interconnected,in much the same way as the form of an object is related to its function. So, the presentresearch is orientated towards the representation of morphological phenomena as ratherabstract formal linguistic objects, that are expected to function as a kind of exchangeformat aimed at interfacing two or more languages in a "transfer-based" MachineTranslation System. As to the nature and content of these representations, manyalternative proposals, put forward in both theoretical and computational linguistic circles,are carefully considered and extensively discussed. In particular, I take advantage ofinsights coming from "Word and Paradigm Morphology" and "Functional Grammar". Inthe end, an original computational framework is presented in somewhat detail, thatcrucially hinges on the notion of linguistic Analogy, as an effective, formal procedure forextending linguistic generalizations from known cases to unknown ones. Within thisframework the set of morphological rules and the Lexicon are not implemented asseparate grammatical compartments, as in most computational models I know of, but theyare really part and parcel of the same self-modelling network of lexical redundancies. Thismove makes the whole computational machinery efficient and cost-effective, whileproviding a convenient and elegant solution to a number of non-trivial theoreticalparadoxes raised in the relevant literature. Such a model has already been subjected tothe test of a computational implementation, and some results of its application to aspectsof Italian Morphology are detailed in the final part of this work.
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