Patent Document ID: 5559693
Application ID: 07723145

Base Claim:
1. A computer implemented method for performing morphological analysis in a computer system by describing inflectional operations on a natural language, the computer system comprising an input device, a memory and a computer processor capable of manipulating a data structure, the natural language comprising sequences of surface strings encoding grammatical properties, the computer implemented method comprising the steps of: a. providing a language syntax that defines statement forms for statements that describe the inflectional morphology of the natural language; b. accepting as input at the input device, which is coupled to the computer processor, a set of language statements that follow said language syntax to describe the inflectional morphology of the natural language, said input comprising rule statements: i. defining a set of morpho-syntactic features corresponding to grammatical distinctions within the parts of speech categories in the natural language; ii. defining a set of inflectional morphological paradigms, said inflectional morphological paradigms comprising form rule statements to describe the construction of word forms and associate with each construction pre-selected ones of said morpho-syntactic features, said form rule statements comprising stem and affix components that describe the inflectional morphology corresponding to grammatical construction rules commonly known in the natural language; iii. defining a lexicon, said lexicon containing a set of word entries containing representative forms of each word of a language that are associated to a pre-selected one of said inflectional morphological paradigms; c. creating a computer-manipulatable data structure from the set of language statements; and d. performing a morphological analysis utilizing said computer-manipulatable data structure.

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Claim 2:
2. The computer implemented method of claim 1 comprising the following additional steps: a. providing, in the language syntax, statements forms for the declaration of orthographic rules of the natural language, to specify spelling changes that apply to form rules across paradigms, the statements forms defining an orthographic rule having a right-hand-side and a left-hand-side, left-hand-side identifying a context in which the orthographic rule is to apply and a right-hand-side declaring the construction of the resulting orthographic form; and b. accepting as input to the computer processor, a second set of language statements that declare an orthographic rule according to the language syntax.