Incremental Learning of Affix Segmentation

This paper presents a supervised machine learning approach to incrementally learn and segment affixes using generic background knowledge. We used Prolog script to split an affix from the Amharic word for further morphological analysis. Amharic, a Semitic language, has very complex inflectional and derivational verb morphology, with many possible prefixes and suffixes which are used to show various grammatical features. Further segmentation of the affixes into valid morphemes is a challenge addressed in this paper. The paper demonstrates how incremental and easy-to-complex examples can be used to learn such language constructs. The experiment revealed that affixes could be further segmented into valid prefixes and suffixes using a generic and robust string manipulation script by the help of intelligent teacher who presents examples in incremental order of complexity allowing the system to gradually build its knowledge. The system is able to do the segmentation with 0.94 Precision and 0.97 Recall rates.