A Morphological Analyzer for Akkadian Verbal Forms with a Model of Phonetic Transformations

The paper describes a first a t tempt to design a morphological analyzer for Akkadian verbal forms. Akkadian is a semitic dead language which was used in the ancient Mesopotamia. The analyzer described has two levels: the first one is a deterministic and unique paradigm that describes the flexion of Akkadian verbs. The second level is a non deterministic rewriting system which describes possible phonetic transformations of the forms. The results obtained so far are encouraging. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Akkadian is a dead Semitic language that was spoken and written in Mesopotamia between 2800 and 0 B.C. The main difficulty in this language is that verbs take a great variety of forms that differ not only by their ending, as in IndoEuropean languages, but also by the beginning and by the middle part. The only constant in all the forms of a verb is the root, which is composed of three consonants. These consonants appear mixed with other consonants and various vowels. Furthermore, some of the root consonants may be "weak," meaning they do not appear in actual forms. At times, a weak consonant simply disappears, at others, it mutates to another consonant or to a vowel. We have constructed a two-part morphological analyzer for Akkadian verbal forms. The first is a grammar, which describes the systematic morphotactics of Akkadian verbs. There is a single paradigm for all verbs, weak or strong. The second component is a transducer, which changes a given theoretical form generated by the grammar into an actual form, by applying some phonetic transformation rules (e.g., assimilation, mutation, etc.). This transducer does not rely on a phonetic theory but on a set of observed transformations. In fact, the transducer is primarily used backwards, to retrieve the theoretical original form from an actual word to be parsed. The morphological analyzer recognizes all the verbal forms we have collected so far. On the other hand, the second level is not efficient on long forms. The paper describes the first results obtained in a work in progress. These results show that more sophisticated computational methods must be used in order to improve the efficiency. The next section is devoted to the Akkadian language. It is followed by brief description of Akkadian verbs and how they conjugate. The morphological analyzer, its two components, and its results are presented in section 4. 2 T h e A k k a d i a n L a n g u a g e Akkadian is a dead language of the Semitic family. It was used as a native language in Mesopotamia and as a written language in a wider area, including the entire near-east: Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, and Persia. The name comes from the city of Akkad, once the center of one of the oldest empires in the region. Akkadian was later the language of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. The oldest documents written in Akkadian date back to approximately 2500 B.C., whereas the most recent ones are from the first century B.C. During the 2500 years of life, the language changed and so has traditionally been divided in several dialects using temporal and spatial criteria (Old Akkadian, Old Babylonian, Medium Babylonian, New Babylonian, Late Babylonian, Old Assyrian, Medium Assyrian, Late Assyrian). Akkadian is written using Cuneiform signs. Most texts are written on clay tablets, though