Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check

Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, Salam Khalifa, Zoey Liu


Abstract
Morphological inflection is a popular task in sub-word NLP with both practical and cognitive applications. For years now, state-of-the-art systems have reported high, but also highly variable, performance across data sets and languages. We investigate the causes of this high performance and high variability; we find several aspects of data set creation and evaluation which systematically inflate performance and obfuscate differences between languages. To improve generalizability and reliability of results, we propose new data sampling and evaluation strategies that better reflect likely use-cases. Using these new strategies, we make new observations on the generalization abilities of current inflection systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.335
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6082–6101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.335
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.335
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jordan Kodner, Sarah Payne, Salam Khalifa, and Zoey Liu. 2023. Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6082–6101, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check (Kodner et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.335.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.335.mp4