Constraint-based Learning of Phonological Processes

Shraddha Barke, Rose Kunkel, Nadia Polikarpova, Eric Meinhardt, Eric Bakovic, Leon Bergen


Abstract
Phonological processes are context-dependent sound changes in natural languages. We present an unsupervised approach to learning human-readable descriptions of phonological processes from collections of related utterances. Our approach builds upon a technique from the programming languages community called *constraint-based program synthesis*. We contribute a novel encoding of the learning problem into Boolean Satisfiability constraints, which enables both data efficiency and fast inference. We evaluate our system on textbook phonology problems and datasets from the literature, and show that it achieves high accuracy at interactive speeds.
Anthology ID:
D19-1639
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6176–6186
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1639
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1639
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shraddha Barke, Rose Kunkel, Nadia Polikarpova, Eric Meinhardt, Eric Bakovic, and Leon Bergen. 2019. Constraint-based Learning of Phonological Processes. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6176–6186, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Constraint-based Learning of Phonological Processes (Barke et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1639.pdf