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This procedure becomes extremely labor-<strong>in</strong>tensive for small words that overlap with other
common words (Lee 2008).
The Greek morphological parser for the PDL (named Morpheus) has been <strong>in</strong> development s<strong>in</strong>ce 1990
and was developed by Gregory Crane (Crane 1991). 149 Crane worked with a database of 40,000 stems,
13,000 <strong>in</strong>flections, and 2,500 irregular forms. In 1991, Morpheus had been used to analyze almost 3
million words with texts that ranged <strong>in</strong> data from the eighth century BC until the second century AD.
S<strong>in</strong>ce then, Morpheus has played an <strong>in</strong>tegral part of the onl<strong>in</strong>e PDL, which has expanded to cover over
8 million words <strong>in</strong> Greek. Crane argued that the parser was developed not just to address problems <strong>in</strong>
Ancient Greek but also to serve as a possible approach to develop<strong>in</strong>g morphological tools for ancient
languages.
More-recent work <strong>in</strong> automatic morphological analysis of Greek has utilized Morpheus as well as other
resources available from Perseus. Dik and Whal<strong>in</strong>g (2009) have discussed their implementation of
Greek morphological search<strong>in</strong>g over the Perseus Greek corpus that made use of two disambiguated
Greek corpora, the open-source part-of-speech analyzer TreeTagger 150 and output from Morpheus. The
backbone of their implementation is a SQLite database backend conta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g tokens and parses for the
full corpus that connects the three ma<strong>in</strong> components: the Perseus XML files with unique token IDs;
TreeTagger, “which accepts token sequences from the database and outputs parses and probability
weights, which are stored <strong>in</strong> their own table”; and PhiloLogic. 151 Accord<strong>in</strong>g to the Dik and Whal<strong>in</strong>g,
their system made use of PhiloLogic, because:
… it serves as a highly efficient search and retrieval front end, by <strong>in</strong>dex<strong>in</strong>g the augmented
XML files as well as the contents of the l<strong>in</strong>ked SQLite tables. PhiloLogic’s highly optimized
<strong>in</strong>dex architecture allows near-<strong>in</strong>stantaneous results on complex <strong>in</strong>quiries such as ‘any
<strong>in</strong>f<strong>in</strong>itive forms with<strong>in</strong> 25 words of (dative s<strong>in</strong>gulars of) lemma X and str<strong>in</strong>g Y’, which would
be a challenge for typical relational database systems (Dik and Whal<strong>in</strong>g 2009).
The results of their work are available at “Perseus Under PhiloLogic,” 152 a website that supports
morphological search<strong>in</strong>g of both the Lat<strong>in</strong> and Greek texts of Perseus. Although Dik and Whal<strong>in</strong>g
noted that they were cont<strong>in</strong>u<strong>in</strong>g to explore the possibilities of natural language search<strong>in</strong>g aga<strong>in</strong>st the
Greek corpus <strong>in</strong> place of the very technical ways supported through PhiloLogic, their system
nonetheless supports full morphological search<strong>in</strong>g, str<strong>in</strong>g search<strong>in</strong>g, and lemmatized search<strong>in</strong>g, and
these features have been <strong>in</strong>tegrated <strong>in</strong>to a read<strong>in</strong>g and brows<strong>in</strong>g environment for the texts.
Some other recent research has focused on the use of mach<strong>in</strong>e learn<strong>in</strong>g and large, unlabeled corpora to
perform automatic morphological analysis on classical Greek. Lee (2008) has developed an analyzer of
Ancient Greek that “<strong>in</strong>fers the root form of a word” and has made two major <strong>in</strong>novations over previous
systems:
149 Far earlier but also highly significant work on the development of a morphological parser for Ancient Greek was conducted by David Packard <strong>in</strong> the
1970s (Packard 1973).
150 http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/corplex/TreeTagger/
151 PhiloLogic (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/philologic/) is a software tool that has been developed by the Project for American and French
Research on the Treasury of the French Language at the University of Chicago, and <strong>in</strong> “its simplest form serves as a document retrieval or look up
mechanism whereby users can search a relational database to retrieve given documents and, <strong>in</strong> some implementations, portions of texts such as acts,
scenes, articles, or head-words.”
152 http://perseus.uchicago.edu/