Morphological Analysis and Synthesis of Manipuri Verbs Using Xerox Finite-State Tools

One of the basic components of any natural language processing applications is the morphological analyzer where the analyzer produces the constituent morphemes of a given word. As all the world languages have its own unique morphological features, approaches to analyze each of these languages may vary. Manipuri, a Tibeto-Burman language, is an agglutinative language. Its verbal morphology is considered to be very rich and complex because of its features on morphosyntax, morphophonemic alterations, long distance dependency, reduplication, etc. Developing a morphological analyzer and generator of words for such a language is a challenging task especially when a standard documentation on the grammar and spelling rules for this language is not available. This paper presents the morphological analysis of Manipuri verbs using the finite-state techniques and tools and shows how the same analyzer can be used to generate/synthesize words with given verb roots and probable lexical tags.