Many natural language processing tasks, including parsing and machine translation, frequently require a morphological analysis of the language(s) at hand. The task of a morphological analyzer is to identify the lexeme, citation form, or inflection class of surface word forms in a language. Striving to bypass the time consuming, labor intensive task of constructing a morphological analyzer by hand, unsupervised morphology induction techniques seek to automatically discover the morphological structure of a natural language through the analysis of corpora. This paper presents a framework for automatic natural language morphology induction inspired by the traditional and linguistic concept of inflection classes. Monson et al. (2004) uses the framework discussed in this paper and presents results using an intuitive baseline search strategy. This paper presents a discussion of the candidate inflection class framework as a generalization of corpus tries used in early work (Harris, 1955; Harris, 1967; Hafer and Weiss, 1974) and discusses an as yet unimplemented statistically motivated search strategy. This paper employs English to illustrate its main conjectures and a Spanish newswire corpus of 40,011 tokens and 6,975 types for concrete examples.
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