Polishform

Polishform is a term used in natural language processing and computational linguistics to denote the canonical base form of a Polish lexeme, commonly referred to as the lemma. It functions as the dictionary form from which the language’s inflected variants are derived. In practice, a Polishform typically encodes the part of speech and serves as the anchor for morphological tagging in Polish texts.

Polish morphology is highly inflected, with nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs exhibiting extensive case, number, gender, aspect, and tense variations. Consequently, lemmatization and the use of Polishforms are central to text normalization, information retrieval, machine translation, and linguistic corpora annotation. In most resource designs, a noun Polishform appears as the singular nominative form; adjectives share the masculine singular nominative; verbs appear in their infinitive form. Exact conventions vary by dataset or tool.

Current usage of the term Polishform is not standardized across the field; it is often used interchangeably with lemmas or base forms. Some systems treat Polishform as a structured object that pairs a lemma with a set of morpho-syntactic features, facilitating uniform handling of inflection in downstream tasks.

Related topics include Lemma, Lemmatization, Polish language, Inflection, Morphology, and Natural language processing.