Background: analysis by synthesis

One possible functional definition of morphological analysis, or parsing, is:

Morphological synthesis is the inverse operation:

It is usually assumed that these two operations are directly reversible: analysis is thought of as "undoing" the process of synthesis. This is literally true when (as is frequently the case) natural language parsers are implemented with finite state transducers.

In polytonic Greek, however, the surface token includes movable accents. The correct orthography of the token results from a complex ineraction of the morphological system, phonological systems, and the accent system. While this process can be computationally implemented to generate surface tokens, it is not stateless; for this reason, a generating algorithm cannot be simply reversed to analyze a token. Kanones therefore takes a different approach to morphological analysis: analysis by synthesis.

Kanones' solution

Kanones' solution could be summarized as:

1. Combine stems and endings to generate all forms that can possibly be recognized from a given dataset.
2. The result is a "parser:" the set of all possible tokens associated with all possible analyses for that token.
3. "Parsing" is reduced to looking up a token in the parser's data.

In 2022, it is feasible to load the complete set of morphological analyses for all possible tokens in a natural language in memory. This approach has the simultaneous advantages of minimal technical requirements combined with very high performance, and is easily implemented from plain-text data sources that a classicist can modify or add to.