Viewing morphology as an inference process

Morphology is the area of linguistics concerned with the internal structure of words. Information Retrieval has generally not paid much attention to word structure, other than to account for some of the variability in word forms via the use of stemmers. This paper will describe our experiments to determine the importance of morphology, and the effect that it has on performance. We will also describe the role of morphological analysis in word sense disambiguation, and in identifying lexical semantic relationships in a machine-readable dictionary. We will first provide a brief overview of morphological phenomena, and then describe the experiments themselves. 1 Introduction Morphology is the area of linguistics concerned with the internal structure of words. It is usually broken down into two subclasses: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphology describes predictable changes a word undergoes as a result of syntax - the plural and possessive form for nouns, and the past tens...