A Finite State Approach to German Verb Morphology

This paper presents a new, language independent model for analysis and generation of word froms based on Finite State Transducers (FSTs). It has been completely implemented on a PC and successfully tested with lexicons and rules covering all of German verb morphology and the most interesting subsets of French and Spanish verbs as well. The linguistic databascs consist of a letter-tree structured lexicon with annotated feature lists and a FST which is constructed from a set of morphophonological rules. These rewriting rules operate on complete words unlike other FST-based systems.