Morfeus+: Word parsing in Basque beyond morphological segmentation

This work describes the formalization of a word structure grammar that represents the complex morphological and morphosyntactic information embedded within the word forms of an agglutinative language (Basque), giving a comprehensive linguistic description of the main morphological phenomena, such as affixation, derivation, and composition, and also taking into account the modeling of both standard and non-standard words. We have identified the relevant issues to be addressed in the representation of such a grammar.We also present the development of Morfeus+, a tool for the analysis of unrestricted texts, testing its applicability and showing that its coverage is wide and robust, allowing the efficient processing of big volumes of data.This paper describes a mature system that has required several person/years and that tries to integrate a rigorous linguistic specification together with more practical implementation matters, such as the appropriate treatment of unknown words in unrestricted texts.