Morphological analyser of Finnish as a finite-state transducer without rules

Abstract

Finnish is considered one of the most complex languages with a particularly rich morphology. In addition to complex morhology, it has also a gradation system and front/back vowel concordance. In earlier times, all these features were considered an ovewhelming obstacle for computational description of this language. The problems were succesfully resolved in 1983, when Kimmo Koskenniemi described Finnish using finite-state technology and two-level rules. In this report I describe a partly similar implemention, which, however, has an impotant difference. The system does not use morphophonological rules at all. As a result, it is a finite-state transducer.