1991:1 - Universitetet i Bergen

POSSIBLE USES OF STEMMA
A program like Stemma has not very much interest in iuelf, since noun
stems per se are not very useful. Bul as a tool program for different
applications Stemma has some interesting perspectives. It has at least
four kinds of possible uses in computer aided language leaming, morp-
hological research, as a part of more sophisticated computational ling-
uistic programs and as a part of an information retrieval system for
Finnish.
A CALL program could easily be developed from Stemma by only
adding some procedures that take care of concating the right suffixes
to the stems given by Stemma. This could be done either straight or
in such a fashion that the program shows first the stems and then asks
the user to produce a certain inflected form. After getting the user's
proposal, the program could check whether it is correctly formed.
As a research tool Stemma could serve in large scale quantitative
analysis of Finnish noun stem formation, while il is able to produce
the stems comparatively fast and reliably. It probably needs some
changes for this use depending on the aims of the research, but these
should be easily done.
While Stemma works only for generation, it could be used as a
module in text generation e.g. in machine translation. As in the CALL
application this would only need formulation of the rules, which take
care of the production of right forms.
Information retrieval programs for Finnish texts are especially inva-
lidated by the complex stem alternations occurring in Finnish words.
For information retrieval purposes a program like Stemma could be
used to produce all the altering forms of the search key. And as
information retrieval is done almost totally with content words, i. e.
nouns. Stemma's capabilities are readily suitable for the work. The only
possible modification could be use of some simple mechanism to check
that hits given by the stem forms are really possible inflected forms
of the input key and not trash.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION AND CHOICE OF
IMPLEMENTATION LANGUAGE
Stemma has been implemented with the programming language Icon,
which has been developed at the University of Arizona in Tucson by
Ralph Griswold and his colleagues (Griswold & Griswold 1990). Icon
is a kind of a successor to Snobol, and has some very good features
for linguistic programming. Of parlicular interest are Icon's good ready