A morphological analyzer using hash tables in main memory (MAHT) and a lexical knowledge base

Abstract

This paper presents a morphological analyzer for the Spanish language (MAHT). This system is mainly based on the storage of words and its morphological information, leading to a lexical knowledge base that has almost five million words. The lexical knowledge base practically covers the whole morphological casuistry of the Spanish language. However, the analyzer solves the processing of prefixes and of enclitic pronouns by easy rules, since the words that can include these elements are much and some of them are neologisms. MAHT reaches a processing average speed over 275,000 words per second. This one is possible because it uses hash tables in main memory. MAHT has been designed to isolate the data from the algorithms that analyze words, even with their irregular forms. This design is very important for an irregular and highly inflectional language, like Spanish, to simplify the insertion of new words and the maintenance of program code.