Augmenting a lexical transducer by analogy

摘要

A method and apparatus for adding a word to a lexical transducer in a computer system. The invention allows a user of the computer system to specify a word to be added to the lexical transducer database. The lexical transducer represents words as ordered sequences of symbols, i.e., characters and morphological tags. "Upper" and "lower" symbols are associated with arcs. The arcs join states and form a path. Each path determines an upper and lower sequence of ordered symbols. The upper sequence of symbols represents a base form of a word and the lower sequence of symbols represents a surface form of the same word. The user adds a word to the lexical transducer by specifying a "model" word already existing in the lexical transducer, along with a new word that has surface forms analogous to the model word. The new word is added to the lexical transducer by sharing, as much as possible, the existing arcs of the path of the model word.