A Lexical Transducer (LT) as defined by Karttunen, Kaplan, Zaenen
1992 is a
specialized finite state transducer (FST) that relates citation forms of
words and
their morphological categories to inflected surface forms. Using LTs is
advantageous
because the same structure and algorithms can be used for morphological
analysis
(stemming) and generation. Morphological processing (analysis and generation)
is
computationally faster, and the data for the process can be compacted more
tightly
than with other methods. The standard way to construct an LT consists of
three
steps: (1) constructing a simple finite state source lexicon
LA which defines all valid
canonical citation forms of the language; (2) describing morphological
alternations
by means of two-level rules, compiling the rules to FSTs, and intersecting
them to
form a single rule transducer RT; and (3) composing LA and RT.