A Morphological Processor for Malayalam Language

Work on morphological analyzers (which are computer programmes) for Indian languages is conducted vigorously these days. Usually published in specialized journals, this rather technical work is briefly presented here to provide some insights to a wider readership into little-known aspects of current language work. The morphological strength of Malayalam as a major South Indian language justifies the use of thorough morphological processing, which is the first step in any natural language processing task. The project is aimed at building a morphological processor for language, with two main components: a morphological generator and a morphological analyzer. The computational model of the processor takes care of the processing of nouns, pronouns, verbs and modifiers. The results obtained are encouraging and the work can be extended to the creation of a full-fledged part-of-speech tagger for Malayalam and other Dravidian languages, since they all exhibit structural homogeneity.