surface analysis
nounEtymology From surface (“an outward appearance”) + analysis.
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences Any synchronically valid analysis of a word’s morphology regardless of whether it represents its diachronic etymology, that is, its historical origin.
- Class guessers for the Xerox tagger assign potential POS [part-of-speech] tags to unknown words according to a surface analysis of the word form. In addition to the common practice of mapping POS tags according to the words’ suffixes, this implementation makes use of the case of the initial letter of a word, which is highly significant for POS assignment in German.2013, S. Armstrong, Kenneth W. Church, Pierre Isabelle, Sandra Manzi, Evelyne Tzoukermann, David Yarowsky, Natural Language Processing Using Very Large Corpora, →ISBN:
2
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see surface, analysis.
- Related terms
- folk etymology, reanalysis, rebracketing, typology