Morphological Inflection is the task of generating a target (inflected form) word from a source word (base form), given a morphological attribute, e.g. number, tense, and person etc. It is useful for alleviating data sparsity issues in translating morphologically rich languages. The transformation from a base form to an inflected form usually includes concatenating the base form with a prefix or a suffix and substituting some characters. For example, the inflected form of a Finnish stem eläkeikä (retirement age) is eläkeiittä when the case is abessive and the number is plural.
The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort to improve how NLP handles complex morphology in the world’s languages. The goal of UniMorph is to annotate morphological data in a universal schema that allows an inflected word from any language to be defined by its lexical meaning, typically carried by the lemma, and by a rendering of its inflectional form in terms of a bundle of morphological features from our schema. The specification of the schema is described here and in Sylak-Glassman (2016).