A Computational Analysis of the Persian Noun Phrase
Karine Megerdoomian
Abstract
The highly ambiguous structure of the Persian Noun Phrase (NP) causes
immense difficulties for automatic parsing of written text. Factors
contributing to the ambiguity of the Persian NP structure include the
lack of overt morphology to mark boundaries, the fact that short
vowels are not written in Persian text, a relatively free word order
and the optionality of the subject. This paper introduces the
constituents forming a Noun Phrase in Persian. The syntax of NPs and
relative clauses is described. A closer study of the Noun Phrase
provides lexical and morphological clues for determining
boundaries. To describe the NP rules in the Shiraz machine translation
project, developed at CRL, a
unification-based syntactic grammar was used, which operates on typed
feature structures.
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