WORD ANNOTATION SYSTEM

A system for annotating digitally encoded text includes a dictionary of base forms. For each base form, a first set of tags represents possible grammatical and syntactic properties of the word, and may encode inflectional paradigms of the base form, or feature agreement behavior and special processing. If a text word is not found in the dictionary, an inflectional analyzer looks up one or more base forms derived from the word, and if found, and annotates them with their dictionary tags. A morphological analyzer assigns tags to words not retrieved in the dictionary. The morphological analyzer recognizes words formed by prefixation and suffixation, as well as proper nouns, ordinals, idiomatic expressions, and certain classes of character strings. The tagged words of a sentence are then processed to parse the sentence.