Automatic Analysis of Adjectives in Estonian

Abstract The aim of the present article is to describe problems that were encountered in the morpho-logical and syntactic analysis of adjectives in Estonian and to give an overview of the semanticclasses of adjectives which should be distinguished in order to arrive at correct automatic analy-sis. 1. Introduction A team at Tartu Universityhas been working for some years at devisingthe Constraint Gram-mar for Estonian - the morphological disambiguator and syntax analyser. The morphologicalrichness and the free word order of the Estonian language result in many interesting and com-plicated problems, some of which also turned up in devising rules for automatic analysis ofadjectives.The present article discusses problems which are characteristic of morphological and syn-tactic description of adjectives and which appeared during the design of the syntactic analyserfor Estonian. The framework that has been used is Constraint Grammar (Karlsson et al, 1995)which is described in Section 2. Section 3 gives an overview of the linguistic background ofthe problems that occurred in the automatisation of the morphological and syntactic analysis ofadjectives. Section 4 discusses some aspects of the morphological disambiguation of adjectivesand Section 5 aspects of their syntactic analysis.The theoretical discussion is based on the experience that was gained in the process of man-ual disambiguation of word forms of the novel ”1984” by Georg e Orwell and on the use ofthat knowledge in the further development of the morphological disambiguator and syntacticanalyser.