clitichandling
Clitichandling is an informal term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe methods for identifying, segmenting, and analyzing clitics—morphological elements that attach to a host word but behave syntactically like independent words. The label appears most often in computational contexts where orthographic conventions, tokenization, and syntactic parsing must account for clitic forms.
Clitics can be enclitic (following a host) or proclitic (preceding a host) and are common in Romance,
Approaches to clitichandling range from rule-based tokenizers and finite-state transducers that implement language-specific morphotactic rules, to
Clitichandling has practical implications for machine translation, speech recognition, syntactic parsing, and corpus annotation. Challenges include