Morphological Analysis for Manipuri Nominal Category Words with Finite State Techniques

Abstract

The paper presents the design and the implementation of a morphological analyzer for Manipuri nominal category words. A method for the analysis of nominal category Manipuri words with a suffix stripping approach in a right to left direction without using any lexicon has been proposed. Manipuri being an agglutinative language and its rule-based nature while morpheme concatenation allows the morphotactics of the different available word forms to be modeled with finite state machines (FSMs). Also the very feature of the word classes which possess the characteristics that they can only be attached with affixes meant for that class only make it possible to analyze a nominal word without a lexicon. This paper discusses the morphological features of Manipuri nominal category, identifying the affixes for this class, and the steps of the new methodology to develop the FSM for nominal category to represent the morphotactics of the language, converting the FSM from non-deterministic finite automata (NFA) to deterministic finite automata (DFA) and thereby cooperating the analysis.