Building a Syllabic Analyzer for Persian Using Finite State Transducers

Persian follows a concatenative morphology, where new morphemes are generated by chaining different morphemes together to form a new compound word. Whenever, two morphemes bind to form a new morpheme, there is a possibility that the syllables at the morpheme boundaries undergo structural change. This study suggests that these syllabic alterations may be captured using a finite state approach. It further argues that syllabification may be incorporated into the process of lexicon building. This approach allows the syllabification rules to be encoded in the lexical knowledge, when a lexicon is built using the finite state methods. The rules captured here can also assist the processing of syllabic alterations in word boundaries as well. It is particularly useful to process meter in Persian poetry.