Cheyenne Wing


2023

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Morphological reinflection with weighted finite-state transducers
Alice Kwak | Michael Hammond | Cheyenne Wing
Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

This paper describes the submission by the University of Arizona to the SIGMORPHON 2023 Shared Task on typologically diverse morphological (re-)infection. In our submission, we investigate the role of frequency, length, and weighted transducers in addressing the challenge of morphological reinflection. We start with the non-neural baseline provided for the task and show how some improvement can be gained by integrating length and frequency in prefix selection. We also investigate using weighted finite-state transducers, jump-started from edit distance and directly augmented with frequency. Our specific technique is promising and quite simple, but we see only modest improvements for some languages here.