Unsupervised, Semi-Supervised and LLM-Based Morphological Segmentation for Bribri

Carter Anderson, Mien Nguyen, Rolando Coto-Solano


Abstract
Morphological Segmentation is a major task in Indigenous language documentation. In this paper we (a) introduce a novel statistical algorithm called Morphemo to split words into their constituent morphemes. We also (b) study how large language models perform on this task. We use these tools to analyze Bribri, an under-resourced Indigenous language from Costa Rica. Morphemo has better performance than the LLM when splitting multimorphemic words, mainly because the LLMs are more conservative, which also gives them an advantage when splitting monomorphemic words. In future work we will use these tools to tag Bribri language corpora, which currently lack morphological segmentation.
Anthology ID:
2025.americasnlp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Manuel Mager, Abteen Ebrahimi, Robert Pugh, Shruti Rijhwani, Katharina Von Der Wense, Luis Chiruzzo, Rolando Coto-Solano, Arturo Oncevay
Venues:
AmericasNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
63–76
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.americasnlp-1.7/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carter Anderson, Mien Nguyen, and Rolando Coto-Solano. 2025. Unsupervised, Semi-Supervised and LLM-Based Morphological Segmentation for Bribri. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), pages 63–76, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised, Semi-Supervised and LLM-Based Morphological Segmentation for Bribri (Anderson et al., AmericasNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.americasnlp-1.7.pdf