- My first true CL/NLP project was a Python program that used regular expressions to analyze Akkadian nouns in specific (check it out here). I had the idea in mind for a good bit before that, but my first true implementation was built sometime in December of 2025. I chose Akkadian mainly because in terms of Semitic languages, nouns are agglutinative and there are no broken plurals, and so are concatenative. In verbs, however, they do go beyond simple regexes without backreferencing, lookaheads and lookbehinds, which is why I didn't use them here. The concatenative character of Akkadian morphology makes it conducive for a normal regular language as opposed to something more expressive, maybe something between regular and context-free (since verbs do require processing the roots and stems in conjunction, I think they go beyond a memoryless regular language and would require recursion to extract features, but regexes do have that expressive power anyway). Regexes also have the power for a letter either to exist once or not at all (?), so handling mimation was a breeze.
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