For example, given the English verb swim, and a simple inflection table swim#swam#swum, 2 we make the assumption that the common sequences sw and m are irrelevant to the inflection, and that by disregarding these strings, we can focus on the segments that vary within the table-in this case the variation i∼a∼u.
we can assume sw and m to be variables that vary from word to word and describe the table swim#swam#swum as x 1 +i+x 2 #x 1 +a+x 2 #x 1 +u+x 2 , where x 1 =sw and x 2 =m in the specific table.