The paper explores the development of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for Armenian, by using data from two standard dialects (Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian). The goal is to develop a joint bi-variational model. We achieve state-of-the-art results. Results from our ASR experiments demonstrate the impact of dataset selection and data volume on model performance. The study reveals limited transferability between dialects, although integrating datasets from both dialects enhances overall performance. The paper underscores the importance of dataset diversity and volume in ASR model training for under-resourced languages like Armenian.

We present a free/open-source morphological transducer for Western Armenian, an endangered and low-resource Indo-European language. The transducer has virtually complete coverage of the language’s inflectional morphology. We built the lexicon by scraping online dictionaries. As of submission, the transducer has a lexicon of 75K words. It has over 90% naive coverage on different Western Armenian corpora, and high precision.

Given the empirical landscape of possible prosodic parses, this paper examines the computations required to formalize the mapping from syntactic structure to prosodic structure. In particular, we use logical tree transductions to define the prosodic mapping of ditransitive verb phrases in SVO languages, building off of the typology described in Kalivoda (2018). Explicit formalization of syntax-prosody mapping revealed a number of unanswered questions relating to the fine details of theoretical assumptions behind prosodic mapping.

Linguists disagree on whether morphological representations should be strings or trees. We argue that tree-based views of morphology can provide new insights into morphological complexity even in cases where the posited tree structure closely matches the surface string. Our argument is based on a subregular case study of morphologically conditioned allomorphy, where the phonological form of some morpheme (the target) is conditioned by the presence of some other morpheme (the trigger) somewhere within the morphosyntactic context. The trigger and target can either be linearly adjacent or non-adjacent, and either the trigger precedes the target (inwardly sensitive) or the target precedes the trigger (outwardly sensitive). When formalized as string transductions, the only complexity difference is between local and non-local allomorphy. Over trees, on the other hand, we also see a complexity difference between inwardly sensitive and outwardly sensitive allomorphy. Just as unboundedness assumptions can sometimes tease apart patterns that are equally complex in the finitely bounded case, tree-based representations can reveal differences that disappear over strings.

The 2022 SIGMORPHON–UniMorph shared task on large scale morphological inflection generation included a wide range of typologically diverse languages: 33 languages from 11 top-level language families: Arabic (Modern Standard), Assamese, Braj, Chukchi, Eastern Armenian, Evenki, Georgian, Gothic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hungarian, Itelmen, Karelian, Kazakh, Ket, Khalkha Mongolian, Kholosi, Korean, Lamahalot, Low German, Ludic, Magahi, Middle Low German, Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Polish, Pomak, Slovak, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Veps, and Xibe. We emphasize generalization along different dimensions this year by evaluating test items with unseen lemmas and unseen features separately under small and large training conditions. Across the five submitted systems and two baselines, the prediction of inflections with unseen features proved challenging, with average performance decreased substantially from last year. This was true even for languages for which the forms were in principle predictable, which suggests that further work is needed in designing systems that capture the various types of generalization required for the world’s languages.

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation, and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements on several fronts that were made in the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g., missing gender and macrons information. We have amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

This paper investigates bounds on the generative capacity of prosodic processes, by focusing on the complexity of recursive prosody in coordination contexts in English (Wagner, 2010). Although all phonological processes and most prosodic processes are computationally regular string languages, we show that recursive prosody is not. The output string language is instead parallel multiple context-free (Seki et al., 1991). We evaluate the complexity of the pattern over strings, and then move on to a characterization over trees that requires the expressivity of multi bottom-up tree transducers. In doing so, we provide a foundation for future mathematically grounded investigations of the syntax-prosody interface.

This article describes a novel approach to the computational modeling of reduplication. Reduplication is a well-studied linguistic phenomenon. However, it is often treated as a stumbling block within finite-state treatments of morphology. Most finite-state implementations of computational morphology cannot adequately capture the productivity of unbounded copying in reduplication, nor can they adequately capture bounded copying. We show that an understudied type of finite-state machines, two-way finite-state transducers (2-way FSTs), captures virtually all reduplicative processes, including total reduplication. 2-way FSTs can model reduplicative typology in a way which is convenient, easy to design and debug in practice, and linguistically-motivated. By virtue of being finite-state, 2-way FSTs are likewise incorporable into existing finite-state systems and programs. A small but representative typology of reduplicative processes is described in this article, alongside their corresponding 2-way FST models.