The "right" way to do this is to use Finite State Transducers. They're used quite a bit in morphological analysis (deconstructing a word into its morphemes). I enjoyed Finite State Morphology, by Lauri Karttunen and Kenneth R. Beesley. A lot of the material you'll find will be very academic, and the field is a bit Finnish-heavy (It has far richer morphology than English). But one of the attractive features of the technology is its run-time efficiency. There are a couple widely-used toolkits: Xerox Finite State Toolkit, which comes with the book I mentioned above. (might have licensing issues). And the MIT FST Toolkit.

Some relevant acronyms are WFST, FSA, FSM, and FST for weighted finite state transducers, finite state automata, finite state machines, and finite state transducers. I'm pretty sure Google has a toolkit that's relevant, but I can't seem to find it (I think it uses yet-another acronym for a class of machines that contains WFST's.)

None of these is a Perl solution.

Update: fixed Wikipedia link

Update 2: The Google Research-related kit is OpenFST.