Morphological Engine Demo Material
Here you can find a few demo material about my morphological inflection
engine: videos, diagnostic output, and interactive pages.
Video
Output
TGR
Morphological inflection template generator.
A morphological signature is a sort of marker for the inflected forms, where each
abbreviation separated by dots represents a morphological category, hierarchically
sorted from the highest to the lowest, optionally followed by a set of inflectional
template coordinates prefixed with @. For instance, the acc. sg. rosam
can be marked with signature S.1@num=s,cas=A where S = substantive
and 1 = 1st declension; the coordinates here locate the inflected form
in the ideal 'grid' defined by crossing inflectional axes. In a Latin substantive
the relevant axes are case (nominative, genitive, etc.) and number (singular and
plural), and their combinations define a grid of 6 by 2 cells for a total of 12
inflected forms.
One of the first stages in generating inflected forms is thus building such templates
which could be graphically represented as 'grids', each with the axes relevant to
the morphological category selected by a lemma. This barely corresponds to the 'paradigms'
printed in tables in a traditional grammar. This way the inflection engine will
know how many cells it must fill and how to exactly locate each form in its cell.
Given a set of morphological categories (substantive, adjective, verb, etc.) and
a set of inflectional axes for each of these categories (case, genre, number, mode,
tense, etc.) defined as external parameters in an XML file (one for Latin and another
for Greek) the morphological engine will be able to build such templates using what
I call TGR (Template Generation Rules). Of course, often it will be the case that
a lemma has some "holes" in its ideal template: think e.g. to defective substantives
like vis, or to pluralia or singularia tantum. For these cases, some TTR
(Template Transformation Rules) operate on TGR output to 'remove' from it all the
'cells' which should not be filled with an inflected form. For instance, a singularis
tantum substantive will have a TTR defined as num=p, which 'removes' from
the template all the cells where the value of the inflectional axis number is plural,
thus reducing the template to 6 instead of 12 cells.
In the TGR demo you can generate a template for any category and combination of coordinates.
Just enter the signature (you can use the helper dropdown list to the right of the
signature box to pick one), optionally define a TTR for "holes" in the template
and click the Generate button. You will get a list of all the inflected forms required
by that signature. This can easily show how many forms can be generated for a single
"word": try for instance with a regular (no TTR) verb and you will get more than
600 forms.