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# A Probabilistic Morphological Analyzer for Syriac

**Authors:** Peter McClanahan; George Busby; [Robbie Haertel](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/robbie-haertel/); [Kristian Heal](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/kristian-heal/); [Deryle Lonsdale](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/deryle-lonsdale/); [Kevin Seppi](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/kevin-seppi/); [Eric Ringger](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/eric-ringger/) · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing **Link:** [aclanthology.org/D10-1079](https://aclanthology.org/D10-1079/) · library `aclbulk-2010-mcclanahan-probabilistic-morphological-analyzer-syriac` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**9** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W1505364729) openalex · 2026-10-18[**2** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2010-mcclanahan-probabilistic-morphological-analyzer-syriac/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/D10-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/D10-1079/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/D10-1079.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1505364729)

**Authors (7)**

1. [Peter McClanahan](https://openalex.org/A5109897072) h 5 · 168 citations · 17 works
2. [George Busby](https://openalex.org/A5076152876) h 2 · 78 citations · 8 works
3. [Robbie Haertel](https://openalex.org/A5017536910) h 9 · 275 citations · 31 works
4. [Kristian Heal](https://openalex.org/A5061488216) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7710-5252) · h 6 · 104 citations · 62 works
5. [Deryle Lonsdale](https://openalex.org/A5017104888) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7784-6061) · h 20 · 1542 citations · 139 works
6. [Kevin Seppi](https://openalex.org/A5029074659) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4932-2700) · h 23 · 1923 citations · 137 works
7. [Eric Ringger](https://openalex.org/A5090791372) h 21 · 1822 citations · 103 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 authors build a data-driven morphological analyzer for Syriac, an unvocalized Aramaic dialect with no existing tools, which needs only labelled data. Their training set is the Peshitta New Testament in Kiraz's 1994 annotation (109,640 tokens). The analyzer is a pipeline of maximum-entropy Markov models: segmentation into prefix, stem and suffix; baseform linkage; root linkage; suffix tagging; and stem tagging, with n-best beams passed between stages. Unknown words back off to a consonant-level BI model and to edit-script "lemma classes" borrowed from Morfette. Under ten-fold cross-validation the joint model reaches 86.47% word accuracy against an 80.76% naive baseline (a 29.7% error reduction), and about 80% with roughly 34,500 training tokens.

## Ideas

- I1. Consonant-level segmentation for unknown words: label each consonant as beginning or inside a prefix, stem or suffix, and forbid any transition that puts a prefix after a stem. For `tools/hbo`, use this as the fallback when the `lex` or `pre` tables have no entry for an unpointed token; the legal-transition rule is a finite-state constraint and stays deterministic.
- I2. Lemma classes for unknown lemmas: encode a lemma as the list of insert and delete operations (with positions) that turn the stem into it, and count which operations recur. In [The lexicon of Biblical Aramaic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/lexicon/) this gives a rule-based guess for an unseen Aramaic lemma, checkable against the dictionary.
- I3. Report decision-level accuracy (the number of decisions a human annotator would correct) next to word accuracy, and keep the naive most-frequent baselines as the floor in the same table. The baseline for an unknown root is the first three consonants of the baseform; that is a cheap rule to test in [The lexicon of Biblical Aramaic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/lexicon/).

## For Mova

I1 goes into `tools/hbo` (segmenter fallback for unknown tokens) and is recorded in [13. Biblical Hebrew in Mova: the tools](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/13-mova-tools/). I2 goes into [The lexicon of Biblical Aramaic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/lexicon/). I3 is a measurement for `tools/hbo` and for the evaluation notes in [Aramaic in Mova: what it would need](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/mova/). The paper's joint pipeline is a design sketch only; nothing of it is a neural model that Mova would run at test time.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{mcclanahan2010probabilistic,
  title = {{A Probabilistic Morphological Analyzer for Syriac}},
  author = {McClanahan, Peter and Busby, George and Haertel, Robbie and Heal, Kristian and Lonsdale, Deryle and Seppi, Kevin and Ringger, Eric},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2010},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/D10-1079/}
}
```

- [next → Lemmatization and POS-tagging process by using joint learning approach. Experimental results on Classical Armenian, Old Georgian, and Syriac](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2020-gorene-lemmatization-pos-tagging-process-joint/)
- [↑ back to Aramaic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/arc/)

## References

21 references, 7 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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