Evaluating Shortest Edit Script Methods for Contextual Lemmatization

Olia Toporkov, Rodrigo Agerri


Abstract
Modern contextual lemmatizers often rely on automatically induced Shortest Edit Scripts (SES), namely, the number of edit operations to transform a word form into its lemma. In fact, different methods of computing SES have been proposed as an integral component in the architecture of several state-of-the-art contextual lemmatizers currently available. However, previous work has not investigated the direct impact of SES in the final lemmatization performance. In this paper we address this issue by focusing on lemmatization as a token classification task where the only input that the model receives is the word-label pairs in context, where the labels correspond to previously induced SES. Thus, by modifying in our lemmatization system only the SES labels that the model needs to learn, we may then objectively conclude which SES representation produces the best lemmatization results. We experiment with seven languages of different morphological complexity, namely, English, Spanish, Basque, Russian, Czech, Turkish and Polish, using multilingual and language-specific pre-trained masked language encoder-only models as a backbone to build our lemmatizers. Comprehensive experimental results, both in- and out-of-domain, indicate that computing the casing and edit operations separately is beneficial overall, but much more clearly for languages with high-inflected morphology. Notably, multilingual pre-trained language models consistently outperform their language-specific counterparts in every evaluation setting.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.572
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6451–6463
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.572
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Olia Toporkov and Rodrigo Agerri. 2024. Evaluating Shortest Edit Script Methods for Contextual Lemmatization. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6451–6463, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Shortest Edit Script Methods for Contextual Lemmatization (Toporkov & Agerri, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.572.pdf