Produtividade morfológica e tecnologia do texto: aspectos da construção de um transdutor lexical do português capaz de analisar neologismos

Abstract

This paper presents LEXPOR, a prototype of a morphological component of Portuguese capable of segmenting and classifying the constituents of complex words resulting from suffi xation of -ismo, -iano, -ês and -mente as well as from prefi xing the words so derived with Greek or Latin prefi xes such as neo-, pseudo-, anti-, or ultra-. We assume that a representation of complex words in terms of morphemes and morphosyntactic categories plays an important role not only in corpus linguistics, but also in other subfi elds of text technology, such as Information Extraction and Information Retrieval. This prototype consists of a lexical transducer modeling the set of words that can potentially be built using these derivational affi xes. This transducer was compiled from a morphotactics and morphophonological description of this lexicon fragment as well as orthographic alternation rules formalized in the xfst and lexc fi nite-state programming languages. Its main feature is the ability to analyze neologisms built from non-lexicalized words borrowed from other languages. Since the use of foreign anthroponyms is one of the main causes of the extreme productivity of the derivational affi xes we focus on, LEXPOR provides an adequate architecture for developing an automatic tagger for Portuguese, capable of overcoming the shortcomings of the CETENFolha corpus and of the parser for the VISL project. In both these cases, morphological analyses of complex words formed with the derivational affi xes mentioned above are often either insuffi ciently detailed or simply incorrect.