Dictionary-Free Morphological Classifier of Russian Nouns

A dictionary-free morphological classifier of nouns for a highly inflective language is developed. The classifier is a front-end utility for acquiring a very large DB of Russian collocations and WordNet-like semantic links. For its main functions, the classifier uses the final letters of standard noun forms and extensive morphological and lexical data. The percentage of nouns correctly classified in a standalone manner is now 99.65%. A completely error-free performance is impossible for context-free methods in principle, primarily because of homonymy: the nouns of various senses may decline in different ways. Therefore the classifier’s results are additionally tested against more than 200,000 collocations stored in the DB and, when it is necessary, are automatically corrected.