Morphological analysis is a process for segmenting
words into sub-word units called morphemes. The morpheme
is the shortest textual chunk that still has meaning.
Morphological analysis not only helps in finding the pronunciation
of a word, but also serves as a necessary process
for reducing the number of lexical words in automatic
speech recognition (ASR). For Thai, a morpheme may be
as short as a syllable. Since Thai contains a large number
of monosyllabic words and many polysyllabic words are
concatenations of monosyllabic words, morphological
analysis in Thai consists mainly in a joint process of word
segmentation and syllabification. Due to lack of consensus
on what generally constitutes a word in Thai, word segmentation
is task-oriented. For example, in semantic or
syntactic analysis, it is preferable to work with a longer
compound word, whereas in phonological analysis, a syllable-like
word is more suitable. In this subsection, Thai morphological
analyses including both word segmentation and
syllabification are reviewed.