Computational Nonlinear Morphology: With Emphasis on Semitic Languages (Studies in Natural Language Processing)

By the late 1970s, phonologists, and later morphologists, had departed from a linear approach for describing morphophonological operations to a nonlinear one. Computational models, however, remain faithful to the linear model, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to implement the morphology of languages whose morphology is nonconcatanative. This study aims at presenting a computational system that counters the development in linguistics. It provides a detailed computational analysis of the complex morphophonological phenomena found in Semitic languages based on linguistically motivated models.