The Analysis of German Separable Prefix Verbs in the Microsoft Natural Language Processing System
Michael Gamon, Tom Reutter · 1997
In this paper we present an analysis of separable prefixes in German within the Microsoft Natural Language Processing System. We illustrate a simple solution to the problem of separated prefixes in our augmented phrase structure grammar which uses binary syntactic rules. The solution is based on the treatment of separated prefixes as verbs. We discuss the semi-automatic generation of the necessary lexical entries and the syntactic analysis based on these entries. We show that under our approach only one new rule needs to be added to our grammar to accommodate the facts, and that only small modifications to existing rules are necessary 1 . 1. Separable Prefixes -- the Problem Separable prefixes in German pose an interesting linguistic and computational challenge 2 . In this section we briefly outline the relevant generalizations and facts. Separable prefixes can be separated from the verb stem in two ways: morphologically and syntactically. Morphologically, the prefix and the ste...