Overview and Results of Morpho Challenge 2009

The goal of Morpho Challenge 2009 was to evaluate unsupervised algorithms that provide morpheme analyses for words in different languages and in various practical applications. Morpheme analysis is particularly useful in speech recognition, information retrieval and machine translation for morphologically rich languages where the amount of different word forms is very large. The evaluations consisted of: 1. a comparison to grammatical morphemes, 2. using morphemes instead of words in information retrieval tasks, and 3. combining morpheme and word based systems in statistical machine translation tasks. The evaluation languages were: Finnish, Turkish, German, English and Arabic. This paper describes the tasks, evaluation methods, and obtained results. The Morpho Challenge was part of the EU Network of Excellence PASCAL Challenge Program and organized in collaboration with CLEF.