Richard Compton


2022

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Towards Unsupervised Morphological Analysis of Polysynthetic Languages
Sujay Khandagale | Yoann Léveillé | Samuel Miller | Derek Pham | Ramy Eskander | Cass Lowry | Richard Compton | Judith Klavans | Maria Polinsky | Smaranda Muresan
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Polysynthetic languages present a challenge for morphological analysis due to the complexity of their words and the lack of high-quality annotated datasets needed to build and/or evaluate computational models. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, using linguists’ help, we generate and contribute high-quality annotated data for two low-resource polysynthetic languages for two tasks: morphological segmentation and part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Second, we present the results of state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches for these two tasks on Adyghe and Inuktitut. Our findings show that for these polysynthetic languages, using linguistic priors helps the task of morphological segmentation and that using stems rather than words as the core unit of abstraction leads to superior performance on POS tagging.