OjibweMorph: an approachable finite-state transducer for Ojibwe (and beyond)

This paper describes the design, evaluation, and application of OjibweMorph, a finite-state transducer (FST) for generating and analyzing words in the Central Algonquian language Ojibwe. We created a language-general modular system for creating FSTs from human- and machine-readable spreadsheets, where sets of inflectional and derivational morphology can be defined, combined with a lexical database, and automatically compiled into an FST. We show how this system is applied to generate and analyze the complex nominal and verbal morphology in Ojibwe, with an eye towards how our framework and toolkit can be used to create FSTs for other morphologically complex languages. We evaluate the Ojibwe version of the system by checking the model's performance against a set of inflectional forms and example sentences from the Ojibwe People's Dictionary, and describe the application of the FST to create a linguistically analyzed corpus, an automatic verb conjugation tool for education, a spell-checker, and intelligent dictionary search.