Retrieval of Morphological Variants in Searches of Latin Text Databases

• Published in: Computers and the humanities 1997-01, Vol.31 (5), p.409-432
• Main Authors: Schinke, Robyn, Greengrass, Mark, Robertson, Alexander M., Willett, Peter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adjectives; Algorithms; Applied linguistics; Computational linguistics; Historical text analysis; Information retrieval; Information search; Information search and retrieval; Latin language; Linguistics; Literature; Morphology; Nouns; Retrieval; Searches; Searching; Truncation; Verbs; Words
• ISSN: 0010-4817; 1574-020X; 1572-8412; 1574-0218
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1000996413558

This paper reports a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of a system that has been developed for the identification and retrieval of morphological variants in searches of Latin text databases. A user of the retrieval system enters the principal parts of the search term (two parts for a noun or adjective, three parts for a deponent verb, and four parts for other verbs), this enabling the identification of the type of word that is to be processed and of the rules that are to be followed in determining the morphological variants that should be retrieved. Two different search algorithms are described. The algorithms are applied to the Latin portion of the Hartlib Papers Collection and to a range of classical, vulgar and medieval Latin texts drawn from the Patrologia Latina and from the PHI Disk 5.3 datasets. The effectiveness of these searches demonstrates the effectiveness of our procedures in providing access to the full range of classical and post-classical Latin text databases.