Morphological Reinflection with Multiple Arguments: An Extended Annotation schema and a Georgian Case Study

David Guriel, Omer Goldman, Reut Tsarfaty


Abstract
In recent years, a flurry of morphological datasets had emerged, most notably UniMorph, aa multi-lingual repository of inflection tables. However, the flat structure of the current morphological annotation makes the treatment of some languages quirky, if not impossible, specifically in cases of polypersonal agreement. In this paper we propose a general solution for such cases and expand the UniMorph annotation schema to naturally address this phenomenon, in which verbs agree with multiple arguments using true affixes. We apply this extended schema to one such language, Georgian, and provide a human-verified, accurate and balanced morphological dataset for Georgian verbs. The dataset has 4 times more tables and 6 times more verb forms compared to the existing UniMorph dataset, covering all possible variants of argument marking, demonstrating the adequacy of our proposed scheme. Experiments on a reinflection task show that generalization is easy when the data is split at the form level, but extremely hard when splitting along lemma lines. Expanding the other languages in UniMorph according to this schema is expected to improve both the coverage, consistency and interpretability of this benchmark.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-short.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
196–202
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Guriel, Omer Goldman, and Reut Tsarfaty. 2022. Morphological Reinflection with Multiple Arguments: An Extended Annotation schema and a Georgian Case Study. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 196–202, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Morphological Reinflection with Multiple Arguments: An Extended Annotation schema and a Georgian Case Study (Guriel et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.21.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.21.mp4