6. The system of claim 5 wherein the computer instructions, executed on the one or more processors, use the sequence of feature symbols with associated parameters to identify candidate words, candidate morphemes, or candidate words and morphemes corresponding to the subimage that are encoded as sequences of standard feature symbols within the hierarchically organized data structure by: traversing the hierarchically organized data structure, according to the sequence of feature symbols with associated parameters, to identify candidate nodes of the hierarchically organized data structure.
7. The system of claim 6 wherein the computer instructions, executed on the one or more processors, traverse the hierarchically organized data structure, according to the sequence of feature symbols with associated parameters, to identify candidate nodes of the hierarchically organized data structure by: setting the value to a penalty value comprising an initial value; and recursively traversing the hierarchically organized data structure from the root node downward, accumulating a current penalty associated with each node in each traversal path through the hierarchically organized data structure, to identify candidate nodes as those nodes for which the accumulated penalty value is less than a threshold penalty value.