Morphological Parsing

There's often not enough information at the surface level to correctly determine the morphemes of a word. For example, compare a -s type plural noun to an -es type plural.

Example: Consider these words

Singular	Plural
dog	dogs
kite	kites
box	boxes
matrix	matrices

Comparison between surface and lexical level information.

-s word

surface level

d

o

g

s

lexical level

d

o

g

+N

+Pl

Regular -es word

surface level

b

o

x

e

s

lexical level

b

o

x

+N

+Pl

Irregular -es word

surface level

m

a

t

r

i

c

e

s

lexical level

m

a

t

r

i

x

+N

+Pl

Addition of intermediate level representation.

Regular -es word

surface level

b

o

x

e

s

intermediate level

b

o

x

^

s

#

lexical level

b

o

x

+N

+Pl