Morphological Analysis of Inflectional Compound Words in Bangla

The addition of inflectional suffixes in Bangla compound words is fairly complex. Normally, when two root words are joined, the corresponding inflectional suffix of each root word is deleted from the final compound word. In Bangla however, the compound word’s individual root words may retain their inflectional suffixes even in the final compound word. This non-deletion of inflection creates an ambiguity as the context-free word grammar cannot recognize whether the final inflectional suffix of a compound word is an inflectional property of the last constituent root-word or of the final compound word. We use a feature unification based morphological parser which can successfully and efficiently parse compound words having inflectional suffixes and at the same time resolve such ambiguities.