Ormformede

Ormformede is a formal framework for encoding and transforming word forms in computational linguistics. It provides a structured way to represent a lemma together with its inflectional and derivational morphology, while preserving the surface form. A unit of ormformede, often called a form node, comprises fields such as language, lemma, morph type, surface form, and a set of morphological features. The goal is to enable precise round-tripping between a word’s surface appearance and its underlying morphological structure.

Origin and terminology: The term ormformede was introduced by researchers exploring standardized representations of complex morphology. The name combines elements suggesting orthography, morphology, and form encoding, and it has been used primarily in research on morphologically rich languages and cross-language data exchange.

Structure and features: The framework uses a layered representation. The base form (lemma) identifies the canonical dictionary entry. An inflectional layer captures tense, number, mood, person, and other grammatical categories. A derivational layer records prefixes and suffixes that alter meaning or word class. Each form node carries language, part of speech, and optional gloss or semantic tags. The design emphasizes form-preserving encodings that support reliable generation and analysis across languages, including non-concatenative or templatic morphologies.

Applications: Ormformede is employed in corpus annotation, lexicon development, and the training of morphological analyzers and generators. It facilitates data exchange between NLP tools and supports comparative studies of morphology across languages. It remains under development in several linguistic research communities.

Example: For the English word "talked," an ormformede encoding might include lemma talk, morph Verb, surface form talked, and features Tense=Past, Aspect=Perfective. See also morphological analysis and lemmatization.