LatMor: A Latin Finite-State Morphology Encoding Vowel Quantity

• Main Authors: Springmann Uwe, Schmid Helmut, Najock Dietmar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2016-10-01
• Series: Open Linguistics
• Subjects: morphology; finite state methods; Latin; historical linguistics
• Online Access: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/opli.2016.2.issue-1/opli-2016-0019/opli-2016-0019.xml?format=INT

We present the first large-coverage finite-state open-source morphology for Latin (called LatMor) which parses as well as generates vowel quantity information. LatMor is based on the Berlin Latin Lexicon comprising about 70,000 lemmata of classical Latin compiled by the group of Dietmar Najock in theirwork on concordances of Latin authors (see Rapsch and Najock, 1991) which was recently updated by us. Compared to the well-known Morpheus system of Crane (1991, 1998), which is written in the C programming language, based on 50,000 lemmata of Lewis and Short (1907), not well documented and therefore not easily extended, our new morphology has a larger vocabulary, is about 60 to 1200 times faster and is built in the form of finite-state transducers which can analyze as well as generate wordforms and represent the state-of-the-art implementation method in computational morphology. The current coverage of LatMor is evaluated against Morpheus and other existing systems (some of which are not openly accessible), and is shown to rank first among all systems together with the Pisa LEMLAT morphology (not yet openly accessible). Recall has been analyzed taking the Latin Dependency Treebank¹ as gold data and the remaining defect classes have been identified. LatMor is available under an open source licence to allow its wide usage by all interested parties.