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# A Finite-State Morphological Grammar of Hebrew

**Authors:** [Shlomo Yona](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/shlomo-yona/); [Shuly Wintner](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/shuly-wintner/) · **Year:** 2005 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, pp. 9–16 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W05-0702](https://aclanthology.org/W05-0702/) · library `aclbulk-2005-yona-finite-state-morphological-grammar-hebrew` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**13** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2176700180) openalex · 2026-10-18[**12** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2005-yona-finite-state-morphological-grammar-hebrew/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W05-07/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W05-0702/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W05-0702.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1621787.1621790](https://doi.org/10.3115/1621787.1621790)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2176700180)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Shlomo Yona](https://openalex.org/A5038577520) h 3 · 56 citations · 5 works
2. [Shuly Wintner](https://openalex.org/A5032082399) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7154-4764) · h 27 · 2410 citations · 187 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper presents HAMSAH, a bidirectional morphological analyser and generator for Modern Hebrew, written as an XFST grammar over a lexicon of about 20,000 entries. The rules cover prefix particles, root-and-pattern stems, the weak paradigms, the feminine and plural suffixes and the spelling variants of undotted script. Irregular items are written as lexicon additions, replacements and removals, which are compiled into one network. On a sample of about 960 tokens of newspaper text, 91.9% received a correct analysis, 3.9% had no analysis and 4.3% had analyses but none correct; most missing analyses are out-of-lexicon proper names. The compiled network is about 4 MB and analyses 50–100 words per second.

## Ideas

- I1. Irregular entries as overrides: keep a general lexicon and separate `add`, `replace` and `remove` lists, combined as (general minus remove), plus add, with replace taking priority. For irregular nouns and verbs in `languages/hbo` this gives one visible place for exceptions that the general rules should not see.
- I2. Idiosyncratic forms are listed rather than derived; the paper gives an adjective whose feminine does not follow the default h rule and records it as an exception. `tools/hbo` could keep such exceptions as explicit entries with a stated reason, so the analysis can say why it departs from the rule.
- I3. Reuse the paper's evaluation design: a random sample of about 1000 tokens, two human checkers, and three counts (no analysis, analysed but none correct, correct). Run it on the unpointed mode of `tools/hbo` and report the same three numbers with a date.

## For Mova

I1 and I2 apply to irregular nouns in [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/), to irregular verbs in [The verb](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/06-verb/), and to the lexicon handling of `tools/hbo`. I3 is a measurement for `tools/hbo` in unpointed mode. The undotted ambiguity examples in the paper (the form `ebth` with its several parses) are a test set for [2. Script and spelling](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/02-script-and-spelling/).

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1621787.1621790](https://doi.org/10.3115/1621787.1621790)

```
@inproceedings{yona2005finite,
  title = {{A Finite-State Morphological Grammar of Hebrew}},
  author = {Yona, Shlomo and Wintner, Shuly},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.3115/1621787.1621790},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1621787.1621790}
}
```

- [← previous Learning Hebrew Roots: Machine Learning with Linguistic Constraints](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2004-daya-learning-hebrew-roots-machine-learning/)
- [next → Semitic Morphological Analysis and Generation Using Finite State Transducers with Feature Structures](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2009-gasser-semitic-morphological-analysis-generation-finite/)
- [↑ back to Ancient Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo/)

## References

25 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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