Notes on Inflectional morphology in NLP

Inflectional morphology in natural language processing, define inflectional morphology

Inflectional Morphology

It is one of the ways to combine morphemes with stems. 

• Inflectional morphology conveys grammatical information, such as number, tense, agreement or case. 

• Due to inflectional morphological process, the meaning and categories of the new inflected words usually do not change. That is, a noun can be inflected to a noun while adding affixes, a verb can be inflected to a verb in different tense in English.

• We would say, the root word (stem) is inflected to form other words of same meaning and category.

• Inflection creates different forms of the same word.

• In English, only nouns and verbs can be inflected (sometimes adjectives too). Inflectional morphemes are very less when compared with some other languages.

Example:

Category	Stem	Affixes	Inflected word
Noun	word box	-s -es	words boxes
Verb	treat	-s -ing -ed	treats treating treated

In the above example, 

• The inflectional morpheme '-s' is combined with the noun stem 'word' to create plural noun 'words'. 

• The inflectional morpheme '-ing' is combined with the verb stem 'treat' to create a gerund 'treating'.

Useful External link: Essentials of Linguistics 

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• Go to Morphology in Natural Language Processing page

• Go to Derivational Morphology page

• Go to Notes on Natural Langue Processing Home page

• Go to Natural Language Processing Glossary

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