mlinflect 0.0.1

Permissive, rule-based Malayalam morphological synthesizer (noun inflection generation).

mlinflect

A permissive, rule-based Malayalam morphological synthesizer. It does forward morphological generation: given a root and grammatical features, it produces the inflected surface form (the counterpart to morphological analysis/segmentation).

from mlinflect import synthesize_noun, Case, Number

synthesize_noun("മരം", Case.LOCATIVE).surface          # 'മരത്തിൽ'
synthesize_noun("മരം", Case.GENITIVE).surface          # 'മരത്തിന്റെ'
synthesize_noun("കുട്ടി", Case.GENITIVE).surface        # 'കുട്ടിയുടെ'
synthesize_noun("മരം", Case.NOMINATIVE, number=Number.PLURAL).surface  # 'മരങ്ങൾ'

Why this exists

Existing Malayalam morphology tools are either copyleft (Apertium, libindic = GPL/AGPL) or, in the case of the one permissive generator (mlmorph, MIT), built on a GPL FST runtime. There is no permissive, dependency-clean, rule-based Malayalam synthesizer. mlinflect aims to fill that gap with a small pure-Python rule engine and no copyleft dependencies.

Design

• Declarative, provenance-tagged rules (mlinflect/rules.py): each rule cites the source it was drawn from and carries a verified flag that is True only when the form has been ratified by a native reviewer. Adding or correcting a paradigm is a data edit, not a code change.
• Inspectable results: every synthesize_noun(...) returns a SynthResult with the surface form, the morphemes that compose it, the stem_class, the provenance key, and verified. Feature combinations that are not yet encoded raise rather than return a silently wrong form.
• Akshara-correct joins: suffixes are represented matra-initial so concatenation produces correct conjuncts/vowel signs; the genitive uses the canonical nta form (NA + virama + RRA).

Status

Alpha. Five ending-conditioned noun classes: am_neuter (മരം) and i_vowel (കുട്ടി) are complete across 11 cases (singular and plural); vowel_anuswara (കലാം), u_vowel (പശു), and ṭ_geminate (വീട്) are partial. Includes differential object marking and a synthetic/colloquial register for the instrumental. Most forms are native-ratified (verified=True); a few are SMC-sourced pending sign-off (verified=False). See LIMITATIONS.md for exactly what is unsupported. Remaining noun classes (a/e-stems, chillu), verbs, and pronouns are future work.

Install

pip install mlinflect        # once published
# from source:
pip install -e ".[dev]"

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE. Contributions are accepted under Apache-2.0 §5 (inbound = outbound); no separate CLA is required.

The implemented linguistic rules are facts restated in our own code; no source's text, tables, code, or data is reproduced. Sources are credited in REFERENCES.md as scholarship; that implies no endorsement and creates no license obligation.