Conference · SIGMORPHON 2020
Linguist vs. Machine: Rapid Development of Finite-State Morphological Grammars
Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pp. 162–170, 2020.
Abstract
Sequence-to-sequence models have proven to be highly successful in learning morphological inflection from examples as the series of SIGMORPHON/CoNLL shared tasks have shown. It is usually assumed, however, that a linguist working with inflectional examples could in principle develop a gold standard-level morphological analyzer and generator that would surpass a trained neural network model in accuracy of predictions, but that it may require significant amounts of human labor. In this paper, we discuss an experiment where a group of people with some linguistic training develop 25+ grammars as part of the shared task and weigh the cost/benefit ratio of developing grammars by hand. We also present tools that can help linguists triage difficult complex morphophonological phenomena within a language and hypothesize inflectional class membership. We conclude that a significant development effort by trained linguists to analyze and model morphophonological patterns are required in order to surpass the accuracy of neural models.
Cite
Sarah Beemer, Zak Boston, April Bukoski, Daniel Chen, Princess Dickens, Andrew Gerlach, Torin Hopkins, Parth Anand Jawale, Chris Koski, Akanksha Malhotra, Piyush Mishra, Saliha Muradoğlu, Lan Sang, Tyler Short, Sagarika Shreevastava, Elizabeth Spaulding, Tetsumichi Umada, Beilei Xiang, Changbing Yang, Mans Hulden. 2020. Linguist vs. Machine: Rapid Development of Finite-State Morphological Grammars. Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, 162–170. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.sigmorphon-1.18
@inproceedings{beemer2020linguist,
title = {{Linguist vs. Machine: Rapid Development of Finite-State Morphological Grammars}},
author = {Beemer, Sarah and Boston, Zak and Bukoski, April and Chen, Daniel and Dickens, Princess and Gerlach, Andrew and Hopkins, Torin and Jawale, Parth Anand and Koski, Chris and Malhotra, Akanksha and Mishra, Piyush and Muradoğlu, Saliha and Sang, Lan and Short, Tyler and Shreevastava, Sagarika and Spaulding, Elizabeth and Umada, Tetsumichi and Xiang, Beilei and Yang, Changbing and Hulden, Mans},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology},
pages = {162--170},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.sigmorphon-1.18}
}