Modularisation of Finnish Finite-State Language Description - Towards Wide Collaboration in Open Source Development of a Morphological Analyser

In this paper we present an open source implementation for Finnish morphological parser. We shortly evaluate it against contemporary criticism towards monolithic and unmaintainable finite-state language description. We use it to demonstrate way of writing finite-state language description that is used for varying set of projects, that typically need morphological analyser, such as POS tagging, morphological analysis, hyphenation, spell checking and correction, rule-based machine translation and syntactic analysis. The language description is done using available open source methods for building finitestate descriptions coupled with autotoolsstyle build system, which is de facto standard in open source projects. 1