Much Ado About Nothing – Identification of Zero Copulas in Hungarian Using an NMT Model

Andrea Dömötör, Zijian Győző Yang, Attila Novák


Abstract
The research presented in this paper concerns zero copulas in Hungarian, i.e. the phenomenon that nominal predicates lack an explicit verbal copula in the default present tense 3rd person indicative case. We created a tool based on the state-of-the-art transformer architecture implemented in Marian NMT framework that can identify and mark the location of zero copulas, i.e. the position where an overt copula would appear in the non-default cases. Our primary aim was to support quantitative corpus-based linguistic research by creating a tool that can be used to compile a corpus of significant size containing examples of nominal predicates including the location of the zero copulas. We created the training corpus for our system transforming sentences containing overt copulas into ones containing zero copula labels. However, we first needed to disambiguate occurrences of the massively ambiguous verb van ‘exist/be/have’. We performed this using a rule-base classifier relying on English translations in the English-Hungarian parallel subcorpus of the OpenSubtitles corpus. We created several NMT-based models using different sampling methods and optionally using our baseline model to synthesize additional training data. Our best model obtains almost 90% precision and 80% recall on an in-domain test set.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.591
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4802–4810
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.591
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrea Dömötör, Zijian Győző Yang, and Attila Novák. 2020. Much Ado About Nothing – Identification of Zero Copulas in Hungarian Using an NMT Model. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4802–4810, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Much Ado About Nothing – Identification of Zero Copulas in Hungarian Using an NMT Model (Dömötör et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.591.pdf