Linguist vs. Machine: Rapid Development of Finite-State Morphological Grammars

Sarah Beemer, Zak Boston, April Bukoski, Daniel Chen, Princess Dickens, Andrew Gerlach, Torin Hopkins, Parth Anand Jawale, Chris Koski, Akanksha Malhotra, Piyush Mishra, Saliha Muradoglu, Lan Sang, Tyler Short, Sagarika Shreevastava, Elizabeth Spaulding, Tetsumichi Umada, Beilei Xiang, Changbing Yang, Mans Hulden

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Sequence-to-sequence models have proven to be highly successful in learning morphological inflection from examples as the series of SIGMORPHON/CoNLL shared tasks have shown. It is usually assumed, however, that a linguist working with inflectional examples could in principle develop a gold standard-level morphological analyzer and generator that would surpass a trained neural network model in accuracy of predictions, but that it may require significant amounts of human labor. In this paper, we discuss an experiment where a group of people with some linguistic training develop 25+ grammars as part of the shared task and weigh the cost/benefit ratio of developing grammars by hand. We also present tools that can help linguists triage difficult complex morphophonological phenomena within a language and hypothesize inflectional class membership. We conclude that a significant development effort by trained linguists to analyze and model morphophonological patterns are required in order to surpass the accuracy of neural models.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Subtitle of host publicationSIGMORPHON 2020
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages162-170
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148194
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics Phonology, and Morphology, SIGMORPHON 2020 as part of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 10 Jul 2020 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics Phonology, and Morphology, SIGMORPHON 2020 as part of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period10/07/20 → …

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