Automatic Analysis of Portuguese Verb Morphology Solving Ambiguities Caused by Thematic Vowel Allomorphs

摘要

We present an automatic morphological analyzer of Portuguese verbs, and discuss its performance in relation to its efficiency and the quality of the results, in dealing with the thematic vowel. We also show the principles that guided its development and how we translated most of the grammatical rules we turned into algorithms. The discussion focuses on the ambiguities caused by thematic vowel allomorphs, by the phenomenon called vowel harmony, and on the resolution of them. The creation of an automatic verb lexicon file was helpful at solving these problems.