Morphological parsing

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The goal of morphological parsing is to find out what morphemes a given word is built from. It should be able to distinguish between orthographic rules and morphological rules. For example, the word 'foxes' can be decomposed into 'fox' (the stem), and 'es' (a suffix indicating plurality).

The generally accepted approach to morphological parsing is through a FST (finite state transducer) that inputs words and outputs their stem and modifiers. This FST is initially created through algorithmic parsing of some word source, such as a dictionary complete with modifier markups.

Another approach is an indexed lookup through a constructed Radix tree. This is not an often-taken route because it breaks down for morphologically complex languages.