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<Paper uid="P95-1004">
  <Title>A Morphographemic Model for Error Correction in Nonconcatenative Strings</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Semitic is known amongst computational linguists, in particular computational morphologists, for its highly inflexional morphology. Its root-and-pattern phenomenon not only poses difficulties for a morphological system, but also makes error detection a difficult task. This paper aims at presenting a morphographemic model which can cope with both issues.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The following convention has been adopted. Morphemes are represented in braces, { }, surface (phonological) forms in solidi, //, and orthographic strings in acute brackets, (). In examples of grammars, variables begin with a capital letter. Cs denote consonants, Vs denote vowels and a bar denotes complement. An asterisk, *, indicates ill-formed strings.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The difficulties in morphological analysis and error detection in Semitic arise from the following facts: * Supported by a British Telecom Scholarship, administered by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust in conjunction with the Foreign sad Commonwealth Office. t Supported by a Benefactor Studentship from St John's College.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Non-Linearity A Semitic stem consists of a root and a vowel melody, arranged according to a canonical pattern. For example, Arabic/kuttib/ 'caused to write - perfect passive' is composed from the root morpheme {ktb} 'notion of writing' and the vowel melody morpheme {ul} 'perfect passive'; the two are arranged according to the pattern morpheme {CVCCVC} 'causative'. This phenomenon is analysed by (McCarthy, 1981) along the fines of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith, 1976).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The analysis appears in (1). 1</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> a v i k t b</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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