The SIL FieldWorks Language Explorer Approach to Morphological Parsing
H. Andrew Black, Gary Simons · 2006
Natural language parsing can contribute to improving our knowledge of less-studied languages as the rigor involved in building a formal description allows the linguist’s hypotheses to be tested and validated against actual data. However, linguistic field workers who are working to describe less-studied languages typically have different skills and needs than computa-tional linguists. Thus, they do not have a good track record for taking ad-vantage of parsers like those used by computational linguists. This paper addresses the parsing requirements of an ordinary working linguist and then describes a morphological parser we have developed to meet those re-quirements. The resulting parser is integrated into Language Explorer, the lexicon and text component of the SIL FieldWorks suite of tools which is designed to be used by a field linguist on a Windows laptop. 1 Why Another Parser? For decades, SIL International has been analyzing and describing many of the world’s less-studied languages. Back in the 1970s, SIL was aware of the potential that parsers offer for aiding linguistic analysis (Grimes 1975, We-ber and Mann 1979, Weber and Mann 1981). In the 1980s we developed full-featured morphological parsing tools that were deployed in the field— AMPLE (Weber, Black, and McConnel 1988; based on Weber and Mann