Impact of Sequence Length and Copying on Clause-Level Inflection

Badr Jaidi, Utkarsh Saboo, Xihan Wu, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg


Abstract
We present the University of British Columbia’s submission to the MRL shared task on multilingual clause-level morphology. Our submission extends word-level inflectional models to the clause-level in two ways: first, by evaluating the role that BPE has on the learning of inflectional morphology, and second, by evaluating the importance of a copy bias obtained through data hallucination. Experiments demonstrate a strong preference for language-tuned BPE and a copy bias over a vanilla transformer. The methods are complementary for inflection and analysis tasks – combined models see error reductions of 38% for inflection and 15.6% for analysis; However, this synergy does not hold for reinflection, which performs best under a BPE-only setting. A deeper analysis of the errors generated by our models illustrates that the copy bias may be too strong - the combined model produces predictions more similar to the copy-influenced system, despite the success of the BPE-model.
Anthology ID:
2022.mrl-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Duygu Ataman, Hila Gonen, Sebastian Ruder, Orhan Firat, Gözde Gül Sahin, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov
Venue:
MRL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
106–114
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.mrl-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.mrl-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Badr Jaidi, Utkarsh Saboo, Xihan Wu, Garrett Nicolai, and Miikka Silfverberg. 2022. Impact of Sequence Length and Copying on Clause-Level Inflection. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL), pages 106–114, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Impact of Sequence Length and Copying on Clause-Level Inflection (Jaidi et al., MRL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.mrl-1.11.pdf