Reeglipõhist

Reeglipõhist is an Estonian adjective meaning rule-based. It describes methods, systems, or analyses that rely on explicit, codified rules rather than learned patterns or statistical inference. In Estonian texts the term is used across disciplines to characterize approaches where human-crafted rules govern behavior, interpretation, or decision making.

In linguistics and natural language processing, reeglipõhised approaches implement sets of formal rules for morphology, syntax, and parsing. In computer science and knowledge engineering, reeglipõhist systems, such as expert systems, apply predefined rules to reason about problems. The concept is also used in education, policy, and regulation to denote procedures determined by fixed guidelines rather than emergent data.

Reeglipõhist methods are praised for transparency and explainability: their outputs can be traced to specific rules, making it easier to audit and adjust behavior. However, they can be brittle when facing unseen inputs or complex real-world variation, requiring extensive rule maintenance. By contrast, data-driven or statistical approaches learn from examples and often handle variability better, but can lack interpretability.

Etymology and usage: reeglipõhist derives from reeegel (rule) and põhine (to be based), with the suffix -hist marking a rule-based quality. The base form is reeglipõhine; you will see inflected forms like reeeglipõhist in grammatical contexts, for example in phrases such as reeglipõhist lähenemist (a rule-based approach).

See also: rule-based systems, expert systems, symbolic AI, prosody of linguistics, contrast with statistical NLP.