William Kezerian


2024

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Ye Olde French: Effect of Old and Middle French on SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task Data
William Kezerian | Lam An Wyner | Sandro Ansari | Kristine M. Yu
Proceedings of the 21st SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

We offer one explanation for the historically low performance of French in the SIGMORPHON-UniMorph shared tasks. We conducted experiments replicating the 2023 task on French with the non-neural and neural baselines, first using the original task splits, and then using splits that excluded Old and Middle French lemmas. We applied a taxonomy on our errors using a framework based on Kyle Gorman’s “Weird Inflects but OK” 2019 annotation scheme, finding that a high portion of the French errors produced with the original splits were due to the inclusion of Old French forms, which was resolved with cleaned data.