Piripori: Morphological Analyser for Tamil

Abstract

Morphology is the study of internal structure of word forms. A morphological analyser is a tool which gets the inflected, derived or compound forms of words as input and retrieves various grammatical implications of the input such as root word(s) and supporting morphemes. Prominent south Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu are agglutinative. In agglutinative languages, complex words are formed by joining morphemes together without changing the spelling or phonetics. With enormous amount of text data being generated daily in different platforms, it is important to have linguistic tools to analyse the same. Several approaches have been proposed for developing a Tamil morphological analyser. The approach adopted for Piripori Tamil morphological analyser is based on word-level morphological rules. This paper proposes a unique architecture for morphological analysis. The computational time taken by Piripori and the state-of-the-art morphological analyser have been analysed and compared with an input set of 137,144 words. It was observed that the proposed approach achieves faster computation when compared to the state-of the-art analyser.