Morphology

Why are we Studying Morphology?

• The knowledge of words will help us

process language computationally at word
level.
• Knowledge of words include word structure
and word formation rules.
• This knowledge will help us in developing
NLP tools like “Morphological Analyzers”
and “Morphological Generators”
• These are important in Information
Retrieval, Machine Translation, Spell
checking, etc.
 What’s Morphology?

• The study of word structure

• The study of the mental dictionary:

– How are words stored in the mind?

– What is a possible word?

• Example:
(i) When their mother signaled, the girls barried home
unhappily.
The word ‘barried’ do not exist. However,
assuming they are valid words of English,
we ‘guess’ the meaning by context and
the position of the word in the given
sentence. We do this using our general
knowledge and linguistic knowledge.
 When their mother signaled, the girls
barried home unhappily.

Part of Speech = verb [position]

[ends in –ed] = past tense

Base form = barry

Meaning = go

The word form is more like carried .

 Morphemes

• Have a sound [form] and a meaning:

Example: “cats”
– /kaet/ “four-legged animal”
– /-s/ “plural number”

– Even though /-s/ has a sound and a meaning,

it can’t mean “plural” by itself.
– It has to attach to a noun.
“A morpheme is the smallest unit of word
form that has meaning”
Examples:
cats = cat + -s
girlish = girl + -ish
unfriendly = un- + friend + -ly

cat, -s, girl, -ish, un-, friend, -ly are

morphemes
 Function words

Function words:
– Are the words used to make the sentence
grammatical
– They have little lexical meaning
– Belongs to closed class category
– Used mainly for determining structure of the
sentence
Examples:
Determiners , pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary
verbs, conjunctions, articles, etc
 Content words/Lexical words

Content words:
– Are the words used to convey what are the
important concepts in the sentence
– They have strong lexical meaning
– They are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc
– Used mainly for determining topic of the
sentence
Examples:
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc
 Morpheme Types

• Free morphemes vs. Bound morphemes

• Lexical morphemes vs. Functional morphemes
• Null/Zero morpheme
• Inflectional morphemes vs. Derivational
morphemes
• Root morphemes vs. Affix morphemes
 Free vs Bound morphemes

• electr- and tox- have isolable meanings in

electric, electrify, toxic, (de-)toxify
• But they cannot be pronounced on their
own: they are bound morphemes
• girl and book have isolable meanings in
girls, girlish, books, booked, booking
• They can occur on their own: they are free
morphemes
 Lexical morpheme
free morphemes: apple, smart, book, slow, eat,
write
They can exist on their own as independent words.

bound morphemes: -ceive, -ject, cran-, -ship, un-,

dis-
They cannot be used independently.
They need another morpheme [free or bound] to
form a word.
Eg: re-ceive, con-ceive, sub-ject, pro-ject, cran-berry,
scholar-ship, fellow-ship, un-kind, dis-obey
 Functional morphemes

free morphemes:
of, with, she, it, and, although, however, because,
then

bound morphemes:
-s, -ed, -ing, -er, -est
 Forming words from Morphemes:
Inflection and Derivation
• Inflectional morphology is the process by
which a root form of a word is modified by
adding prefixes or suffixes that specify its
grammatical function but do not changes its
part-of-speech.
• We say that a lemma (root form) is inflected
(modified/combined) with one or more
morphological features to create a surface
form.
 Forming words from Morphemes:
Inflection and Derivation
• Derivational morphology is the process by
which a root form of a word is modified by
adding prefixes or suffixes that specify its
grammatical function resulting in change in its
part-of-speech.
• We say that a lemma (root form) is derived
with one or more morphological features to
create a surface form.
 Inflection vs. Derivation

• Derivational affixes: allow us to make

new words that alters the meaning.
– There is an error in the computation. [computeV –
computationN] {Nominalisation}
– It is a computational approach. [computationN –
computationalAdj] {Adjectivization}
• Inflectional suffixes: required in order to
make the sentence grammatical
Inflected words belong to the same class
– *Yesterday I walk to class [walkV – walkedV]
– *I like all my student [studentN – studentsN]
 Inflectional Morphology

Examples: [the POS remains the same]

VERBS
EAT = eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating
DRINK = drink, drinks, drank, drunk, drinking
PLAY = play, plays, played, played, playing
0, -s, -ed, -en, -ing are inflectional morphemes

NOUNS
PLAY = play, plays
GIRL = girl, girls
SHEEP = sheep, sheep
-s, 0 are inflectional morphemes
 Derivational Morphology
Two types:
• May change the category {N,V,A,Adv}
driveV +er = driverN
eatv + able = eatableadj
girlN + ish = girlishadj
disturb V + ance = disturbance N

• Doesn’t have to change the category

un + doV = undoV
re+fryv = refryv
un+happyAdj = unhappyAdj
 Derivational – more examples
Verbs
eat – eatable [adj], eatables [noun]
drink – drinking [noun]
play – player [noun]
-able, -ing, -er are derivational morphemes

Nouns
play – playful [adj], replay [verb]
girl – girlish [adj], girlhood [noun]
sheep – sheepish[adj]
-ful, re-, -ish, -hood are derivational morphemes
 Four-way Contrasts

• Lexical, Free: Nouns, Verbs, Adj, Adv

cat, town, call, house, hall, smart, fast
• Lexical, Bound: including derivational affixes
rasp- [raspberry], cran- [cranberry] , -ceive
[conceive, receive], un-, re-, pre-
• Functional, Free: Prepositions, Articles, Conj
with, at, and, an, the, because
• Functional, Bound: inflectional affixes
-s, -ed, -ing [eats, walked, laughing]
Exercise 1: Identify the free and bound morphemes
in the following words

• walked, talked, danced, arrived

• playhouse, watchdog, football player
• drinking, playing, eating
• import, export, transport
• raspberry, cranberry
• invert, convert, divert
• books, pens, boards
• writer, caretaker, rider, fighter

Can the following words be decomposed?

delight, news, traitor, bed, evening
 Exercise 2: Identify the lexical and functional
morphemes in the following words. Mention if they are
free or bound.

• politically
• beautiful
• between
• writing
• raspberries
• unable
• nationalization
Morphology Processing and
Morphology Generation
 Morphology Processing or
Morphology Analysis
• The word banks came from the root word
bank.
• Take the word banks and split it into 2
pieces :
bank + s i.e.,
(root + affixes)
This process is known as morphology
processing or morphology analysis.
 Morphology Generation or
Synthesis
• We have the root word and from the root
word we should be able to produce the
word forms.
Example:
nation – national – nationalism-nationality
 Compounding

Compounds made of more than one stem:

• armchair, family man, milkman
• olive oil, sunflower oil, baby oil
• almond biscuits, Osmania biscuits, dog
biscuits
• stir-fried rice, bottle-opener
• white collar, blue collar
• dashaanan, pitaambar
 Null/Zero morpheme

• A null morpheme is a morpheme that is

realized by a phonologically null affix
(an empty string of phonological
segments)

• A null morpheme is an "invisible" affix.

• It's also called zero morpheme; the

process of adding a null morpheme is
called null affixation.
 Examples
• cat = cat + -0 = ROOT("cat") + SINGULAR
• cats = cat + -s = ROOT("cat") + PLURAL

• sheep = sheep + -0 = ROOT(“sheep") +

SINGULAR
• sheep = sheep + -0 = ROOT(“sheep") + PLURAL
 More examples
• darken[verb] = dark [adj] + -en

redden [verb] = red + -en [make more Red]

yellow [verb] = yellow + 0
brown [verb] = brown + 0
blacken [verb] = black + -en
 Root Morphemes vs Affix morphemes

Root morphemes are morphemes around

which larger words are built.
Root morphemes are free or bound.
Affixes are additional morphemes added to
roots to create multi- or poly-morphemic
words.
Affixes are always bound.
• Rats
Root = rat [free morpheme]
Affix = -s [bound morpheme]
• Project
Root = -ject [bound morpheme]
Affix = pro- [bound morpheme]
• Mice
Root = mouse [free morpheme]
Affix = -s [bound morpheme]
• Ate
Root = eat [free morpheme]
Affix = -ed [bound morpheme]

• Disgracefulness
Root = grace [free morpheme]
Affixes = dis-, -ful, -ness [bound morpheme]
 Affixes
• Morphemes added to free forms to make other free
forms are called affixes.
• Mainly four kinds of affixes:
1. Prefixes (at beginning) – “un-” in “unable”
2. Suffixes (at end) – “-ed” in “walked”
3. Circumfixes (at both ends) – “en—en” in enlighten
4. Infixes (in the middle) – “-um-” in kumilad [‘to be red’],
fumikas [‘to be strong’]
[ kilad = ‘red’, fikas = ‘strong’ in Bontoc language]

Affixes are bound morphemes.

 Prefixes

• No prefix can determine the category of a

complex word:
• Eg: unhappy, unhappiness, unhappily, undo
• What does un- mean when it attaches to
adjectives? unkind, unhappy
• What does un- mean when it attaches to
verbs?
undo, untie
 Suffixes

• We can represent the fact that the rightmost

suffix determines the category of a word for
triplets like -

Eg: rational, rationalize, rationalization

– rational = adjective
– rationalize = verb
– rationalization = noun
 Lexeme and Lemma
In morphology, a lemma is the dictionary form
of a set of words (headword)
In English, for example, run, runs, ran and
running are forms of the same lexeme, with run
as the lemma.
Lexeme, refers to the set of all the forms that
have the same meaning, and
Lemma refers to the particular form that is
chosen by convention to represent the lexeme.
 Stem and Lemma
 The stem is the part of the word that never
changes even when morphologically inflected
 In linguistic analysis, the stem is defined as the

analyzed base form from which all inflected

forms can be formed.
 For example, from "produced", “production”,

“product”, “products” the stem is "produc-".

 A lemma is the base form of the word.

 For example, from "produced", “production”,

“product”, “products” the lemma is "produce“

Lemmatization
 Lemmatization
 The process of determining the lemma for a given
word is called lemmatization.
 The inflected forms of a word can be analyzed as a
single item, identified by the word's lemma.
 For example, in English, the verb 'to walk' may
appear as 'walk', 'walked', 'walks', 'walking'.
 The base form, 'walk', in a dictionary, is called the
lemma for the word.
 The association of the base form with a part of
speech is called a lexeme of the word.
 Lemmatization
• The word “wake" can be
either the base form of a
noun or a form of a verb ("to
wake up") depending on the
context.
• Lemmatization try to
distinguish these two word
senses, stemming would
incorrectly conflate them.
• Lemmatisation attempts to
select the correct lemma
depending on the context.
 Lemmatization

For instance:
1)The word "better" has "good" as its lemma.
This link is missed by stemming, as it requires a
dictionary look-up.
2)The word "walk" is the base form for word
"walking", and hence this is matched in both
stemming and lemmatisation.
Stemming
 Stemming
• Stemming is the process of collapsing words into
their morphological root.
• In linguistic analysis, the stem is defined as the
analyzed base form from which all inflected forms
can be formed. It is a process of linguistic
normalization, in which the variant forms of a word
are reduced to a common form, usually root.
• For example, the terms addicted, addicting,
addictions, addictive, and addicts might be conflated
to their stem, addict.
• The process of stemming is often called conflation.
Example: Porter Stemmer, Snowball Stemmer, Wordnet
Stemmer
 Stemming Utility
The process of stemming is useful in search engines for
Information retrieval
• Query expansion.
• Indexing.
• Natural language processing.
Differences between stemming and
lemmatization
 Differences between stemming and
lemmatization
 Stemming algorithms work by cutting off the end or
the beginning of the word, taking into account a list
of common prefixes and suffixes that can be found in
an inflected word.
 This indiscriminate cutting can be successful in some
occasions, but not always, and that is why we affirm
that this approach presents some limitations. Below
is examples in English:
Form Affixes Lemma
Studies -ies Studi
Studying -ing Study
 Differences between stemming and
lemmatization
 Lemmatization, takes into consideration the
morphological analysis of the words. To do so,
it is necessary to have detailed dictionaries
which the algorithm can look through to link
the form back to its lemma.
Form Morphological Information Lemma

studies Third person, singular study

number, present tense of the
verb study
studying Gerund of the verb study study
How do Stemming and Lemmatization
work?
 Stemming: there are different algorithms that can be
used in the stemming process, but the most common
in English is Porter stemmer. The rules contained in
this algorithm are divided in five different phases
numbered from 1 to 5. The purpose of these rules is to
reduce the words to the root.

 Lemmatization: the key to this methodology is

linguistics. To extract the proper lemma, it is necessary
to look at the morphological analysis of each word.
This requires having dictionaries for every language to
provide that kind of analysis.
 Analyzing a word

• Look at the word ACTORS

• Three morphemes: act, -or, -s
• Root: act
• Suffixes: -or, -s
• Derivational suffix: -or
• Inflectional suffix: -s
• Lexeme: ACTOR
• Word-forms: actor, actors
Stemming Algorithms
 Stemming Algorithms
• There are several types of stemming algorithms
which differ in respect to performance and
accuracy and how certain stemming obstacles
are overcome.

• A stemmer for ENGLISH, for example, should

identify the following :
1) STRING "cats" (and possibly "catlike", "catty"
etc.) as based on the root "cat", and
2) "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed" as based
on "stem".
3) "fishing", "fished", "fish", and "fisher" to the root
word, "fish".
 Brute Force Algorithms
• These stemmers employ a lookup table which
contains relations between root forms and
inflected forms. To stem a word, the table is
queried to find a matching inflection. If a
matching inflection is found, the associated root
form is returned.

Advantages –
- Stemming error less.
- User friendly.
Problems –
- Time consuming.
- Back end updating
- Difficult to design.
 Suffix Stripping Algorithms
• Suffix stripping algorithms do not rely on a
lookup table that consists of inflected forms and
root form relations.
• Instead, list of "rules" are maintained which
provide a path for the algorithm, given an input
word form to find its root form.
• Some examples of the rules include:
– if the word ends in 'ed', remove the 'ed'
– if the word ends in 'ing', remove the 'ing'
– if the word ends in 'ly', remove the 'ly’
 Lemmatization Algorithms
• Involves first determining the part of speech of a
word, and then applying different normalization
rules for each part of speech.
• The part of speech is first detected prior to
attempting to find the root since for some
languages, the rules change depending on a
word's part of speech.
 Hybrid Approaches
• Hybrid approaches use two or more of the
approaches described above .
• A simple example is a algorithm which first
consults a lookup table using brute force.
However, instead of trying to store the entire set
of relations between words in a given language,
the lookup table is kept small and is only used to
store a minute amount of "frequent exceptions"
like "ran => run".
• If the word is not in the exception list, apply
suffix stripping or lemmatization and output the
result