Rule-Based Spanish Morphological Analyzer Built From Spell Checking Lexicon

Abstract: Preprocessing tools for automated text analysis have become more widely available in major languages, but non-English tools are often still limited in their functionality. When working with Spanish-language text, researchers can easily find tools for tokenization and stemming, but may not have the means to extract more complex word features like verb tense or mood. Yet Spanish is a morphologically rich language in which such features are often identifiable from word form. Conjugation rules are consistent, but many special verbs and nouns take on different rules. While building a complete dictionary of known words and their morphological rules would be labor intensive, resources to do so already exist, in spell checkers designed to generate valid forms of known words. This paper introduces a set of tools for Spanish-language morphological analysis, built using the COES spell checking tools, to label person, mood, tense, gender and number, derive a word's root noun or verb infinitive, and convert verbs to their nominal form.