Rule-Based Spanish Morphological Analyzer Built From Spell Checking Lexicon

TL;DR

This paper presents a rule-based Spanish morphological analyzer that leverages existing spell checking resources to identify complex word features like tense, mood, gender, and number, enhancing text analysis capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel morphological analysis tool for Spanish built from spell checking lexicons, enabling detailed feature extraction without extensive manual dictionary creation.

Findings

Successfully labels person, mood, tense, gender, number

Derives root forms and nominal conversions of verbs

Utilizes existing spell checker resources for analysis

Abstract

Preprocessing tools for automated text analysis have become more widely available in major languages, but non-English tools are often still limited in their functionality. When working with Spanish-language text, researchers can easily find tools for tokenization and stemming, but may not have the means to extract more complex word features like verb tense or mood. Yet Spanish is a morphologically rich language in which such features are often identifiable from word form. Conjugation rules are consistent, but many special verbs and nouns take on different rules. While building a complete dictionary of known words and their morphological rules would be labor intensive, resources to do so already exist, in spell checkers designed to generate valid forms of known words. This paper introduces a set of tools for Spanish-language morphological analysis, built using the COES spell checking tools, to label person, mood, tense, gender and number, derive a word's root noun or verb infinitive, and convert verbs to their nominal form.