A Morphological Analyzer for Old Icelandic in FM/Haskell

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to develop a morphological analyzer for Old Icelandic using an extension of the functional programming language FM/Haskell. Old Icelandic, one of the most complex of the early Germanic languages, is closely related to Old English. Old Icelandic is also interesting as it is the language of the sagas, Nordic mythology and early Germanic law. One of the main features of FM/Haskell is code that is easily interpreted, even for non-programmers; this allows the investigators to use students as part of the research team, and to solicit feedback from the user community. An important feature of the morphological analyzer system is the inclusion of an English language look-up tool. Because of the highly inflected nature of Old Icelandic, it is often difficult for students and non-experts to find appropriate English definitions without considerable effort. The system also incorporates a clear method for debugging and error correction. The research team will develop simple user interfaces for adding inflectional prototypes and sub-prototypes, and for adding and editing lexical resources. When fully developed, the system will offer far greater accuracy than earlier morphological analyzers for Old Icelandic. Given the architecture of the system, the approach can be easily extended to other languages; this will be demonstrated by developing a proof-of-concept analyzer for Old English. This extensibility is important for international collaborative efforts that focus on the development of these systems. The research community will be provided with a fast and highly accurate method for adding morphosyntactic detail to the rapidly increasing digital corpus of Old Icelandic documents; with this added detail, the speed and sophistication of searches on the corpus will increase dramatically. All code and instructions will be freely distributed, along with the library of language functions, allowing others to build systems for other morphologically complex languages.