Georgie Botev


2022

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Deciphering and Characterizing Out-of-Vocabulary Words for Morphologically Rich Languages
Georgie Botev | Arya D. McCarthy | Winston Wu | David Yarowsky
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper presents a detailed foundational empirical case study of the nature of out-of-vocabulary words encountered in modern text in a moderate-resource language such as Bulgarian, and a multi-faceted distributional analysis of the underlying word-formation processes that can aid in their compositional translation, tagging, parsing, language modeling, and other NLP tasks. Given that out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words generally present a key open challenge to NLP and machine translation systems, especially toward the lower limit of resource availability, there are useful practical insights, as well as corpus-linguistic insights, from both a detailed manual and automatic taxonomic analysis of the types, multidimensional properties, and processing potential for multiple representative OOV data samples.