Annotated Suffix Tree Method for German Compound Splitting

The paper presents an unsupervised and knowledge-free approach to compound splitting. Although the research is focused on German compounds, the method is expected to be extensible to other compounding languages. The approach is based on the annotated suffix tree (AST) method proposed and modified by Mirkin et al. To the best of our knowledge, annotated suffix trees have not yet been used for compound splitting. The main idea of the approach is to match all the substrings of a word (suffixes and prefixes separately) against an AST, determining the longest and sufficiently frequent substring to perform a candidate split. A simplification considers only the suffixes (or prefixes) and splits a word at the beginning of the selected suffix (the longest and sufficiently frequent one). The results are evaluated by precision and recall.