Implementation for discovery: A bipartite lexicon to support morphological and syntactic analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present and justify aspects of the Montage model of morphology. Montage (Bender et al. 2004) is a long-term project with the goal of building a suite of software tools to assist linguists in the documentation of underdescribed languages by allowing them to make use of techniques from grammar engineering without becoming grammar engineers themselves. An important aspect of the development of these tools is devising models of grammatical phenomena which are both computationally tractable and intuitive to the descriptive linguist. A particularly thorny instance of this is in the development of a sufficiently general model for morphological phenomena, since such phenomena can involve complex interactions among a number of aspects of a language’s grammar. Accordingly, a major area of research within the Montage project, at present, is coming to an understanding of the descriptive linguist’s process of morphological discovery in order to identify what aspects of that process can be facilitated by existing techniques from grammar engineering and to, thereby, develop a general model of morphological analysis to be supported by Montage tools.