System of Analysis and Generation for Amazigh Nominal Morphology based on Xerox's finite-state transducer

This paper presents the first system of analysis and generation for amazigh nominal morphology using a system based on xerox's finite-state transducer platform. In this context our system is based on two main components: a lexicon including 2363 attested nouns, and a set of rules covering the morphotactic and morphological phenomena observed in standard amazigh texts. The choice of finite-state technology makes our system bidirectional (analyzer / generator) and able to cover all variations of amazigh noun (gender, number, state) and to realize an important accuracy (system recognition) which reaches about 77%. This system is an added value for the implementation for other applications like spellchecking, machine translation, and computer aided language learning.