Utótagszer

Utótagszer, literally meaning "suffix tagger" in Hungarian, is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe a system that automatically identifies and annotates suffix morphemes in words. In Hungarian, where words often consist of a stem followed by multiple suffixes, utótagszer plays a central role in morphological annotation and parsing. The tool typically outputs the surface suffixes along with their grammatical functions (such as case, number, possessive, mood, or tense) and often the underlying lemma.

Designs for utótagszer vary and can be rule-based, data-driven, or hybrid. Rule-based versions rely on dictionaries of affixes and finite-state machinery; statistical models learn tag assignments from annotated corpora; modern implementations may combine both with neural sequence labeling. Outputs usually feed into downstream tasks such as lemmatization, syntactic parsing, or information extraction.

Hungarian morphology is highly agglutinative, making suffix tagging especially valuable for disambiguation and corpus annotation. Common challenges for utótagszer include boundary detection between stem and suffixes, allomorphy in affixes, phonological changes, and distinguishing derivational from inflectional suffixes.

Applications include automatic corpus tagging, language technology development, educational tools, and research into Hungarian morphosyntax. Example: the word házakban ("in the houses") can be analyzed as ház (stem) + -ak (plural) + -ban (inessive).

Related concepts include morphological analyzers, lemmatizers, and suffix-based parsing, as well as broader Hungarian NLP resources and finite-state morphology.