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 11:
11. The computer implemented method of claim 1 and comprising the following additional steps: a. providing, in the language syntax, a provision wherein a lexical override feature determines that the construction statements of a form rule are overridden by an identified character string in the lexicon if the lexicon entry for the corresponding word has a corresponding lexicon override form in the entry; and b. accepting as input to the computer processor and storing in the lexicon data entry for a word, a representative form identified for lexical override use.