Along the lines of this question about agglutinative dictionaries, I just finished reading through the paper "Creating lexical resources for polysynthetic languages — the case of Arapaho, by Kazeminejad et al." from the University of Colorado.
In that paper they talk somewhat deeply (albeit only briefly, with minimal examples) about how they built a Finite State Transducer (FST) to what sounds like generate all possible combinations of how you might use a verb base/stem in Arapaho. They said there could easily be up to 100 variations of how you might piece together the prefixes and suffixes around a verb base/stem, in addition to the complicated morphophonological changes that sometimes occur across short or longer distances within words.
But basically, they built some sort of generator that can take a verb base (or stem is it called?) and generate all the possibilities. I guess it also served as a parser too, and could parse an incoming "complete sentence-word" (verb stem + prefixes and suffixes) into the several parts of speech and whatnot. This seems extremely difficult to pull off (they just casually gloss over it like it was nothing haha), even for a skilled programmer. It seems you have to completely master the grammar as well before you can then begin to start creating this parser/generator, and those grammars are often hefty tomes.
My question though is, what goes into the print dictionary, and what goes into this "electronic" dictionary? (which they didn't really describe from the customer perspective very much) Say you built this parser/generator after mastering the Arapaho grammar (or some other polysynthetic language grammar), what then? How does a "user" (customer) use this parser / electronic dictionary? Is it that they would type in a "full sentence-word" (as I'm calling it, with verb stem and several prefixes/suffixes), and it would figure out the verb stem/base, then generate a bunch of derived variations from it on the fly? What is the user experience you would need for such a tool? And what "data" would back the dictionary (i.e. what stuff would they hardcode into the dictionary, like verb stems)?
Finally, they only briefly mention what they might do if they created a print dictionary. I think they just wanted to list the stem, even though you might never use the stem directly in speech, and it requires "advanced skill" to be able to figure out what the verb stem/base is. Can you clarify this part on how a "static" (or "print") dictionary would work in their paradigm for Arapaho (or a polysynthetic language)?
To summarize, I would like to know how a polysynthetic dictionary should work, both dynamically (electronically) and statically (printed), according to what they are going for in the paper. I am not asking "what is the best way to create a polysynthetic dictionary", but instead I just want to get a better sense what these authors are hinting at (they didn't go into enough detail, spent too much time talking about the details of the parser/generator). What does it look like for a learner of Arapaho, how they would use these two tools? Can you provide a richer example?
Next up I am going to take a look at Modeling the Noun Morphology of Plains Cree by Snoek et al., which was linked to by the other paper and which seems like it might offer a little more insight.