Glossario IA
Il dizionario completo dell'Intelligenza Artificiale
Stemming
A heuristic algorithm that removes word suffixes to obtain their root, without necessarily producing a valid dictionary word. A faster but less precise technique than lemmatization.
Morpheme
The smallest meaningful unit of language that cannot be further decomposed without loss of meaning. Morphemes can be free (standalone words) or bound (affixes).
Affix
A bound morpheme that attaches to a base or root to form a new word or modify its grammatical function. Affixes include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes.
Inflection
A morphological process that modifies the form of a word to express grammatical categories such as tense, number, gender, or case. Inflection does not change the fundamental category of the word.
Derivation
The process of forming new words by adding affixes to an existing base, often changing its grammatical category or meaning. Derivation enriches the language's lexicon.
Morphological analysis
A computational process that decomposes words into their morphological constituents and identifies their grammatical properties. Fundamental for many NLP applications like machine translation.
Morphological base
The part of a derived or inflected word to which affixes are attached, often the root or lemma. The base constitutes the element carrying the main lexical meaning of the word.
Inflectional paradigm
The complete set of inflected forms that a word can take according to relevant grammatical categories. The paradigm represents the systematic structure of morphological variations.
Allomorph
Phonetic or graphic variation of a morpheme depending on its context of use. Allomorphs illustrate the complexity of morphological rules in natural languages.
Productive morphology
Set of morphological processes currently active in a language that allow for the creation of new forms. Contrasts with non-productive morphology which concerns frozen historical rules.
Concatenative morphology
Type of morphology where morphemes are added to each other by simple linear concatenation. Predominant in Indo-European languages like French or English.
Non-concatenative morphology
Morphological system where word formation involves internal modifications rather than the addition of affixes. Characteristic of Semitic languages like Arabic with its radical patterns.
Morphological tokenization
Process of segmenting text into meaningful morphological units rather than complete words. Essential for languages with complex morphological structure like Turkish or Finnish.
Infix
Affix inserted inside a root rather than placed at the beginning or end. A rare phenomenon but present in certain languages like Tagalog or some forms of English slang.
Circumfix
Discontinuous affix that inserts as both prefix and suffix around a base. Present in languages like German (ge-t) or Dutch to form certain past participles.
Clitic
Morphological element that behaves syntactically like a word but phonologically like an affix attached to a neighboring word. Clitics occupy an intermediate position between words and affixes.
Morphosyntax
Interface between morphology and syntax studying how morphological properties of words influence their syntactic behavior. Crucial for understanding relationships between form and grammatical function.
Morphological segmentation
NLP task consisting of automatically decomposing words into constituent morphemes. Fundamental for the analysis of agglutinative languages and recognition of unknown words.
Morphological tagging
Process of automatically annotating tokens with detailed morphological information such as grammatical category, tense, mood, or number. Finer than traditional simple POS tagging.