@inproceedings{boldt-mortensen-2025-morpheme,
    title = "Morpheme Induction for Emergent Language",
    author = "Boldt, Brendon  and
      Mortensen, David R.",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1284/",
    pages = "25275--25290",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "We introduce CSAR, an algorithm for inducing morphemes from emergent language corpora of parallel utterances and meanings.It is a greedy algorithm that (1) weights morphemes based on mutual information between forms and meanings, (2) selects the highest-weighted pair, (3) removes it from the corpus, and (4) repeats the process to induce further morphemes (i.e., Count, Select, Ablate, Repeat).The effectiveness of CSAR is first validated on procedurally generated datasets and compared against baselines for related tasks.Second, we validate CSAR{'}s performance on human language data to show that the algorithm makes reasonable predictions in adjacent domains.Finally, we analyze a handful of emergent languages, quantifying linguistic characteristics like degree of synonymy and polysemy."
}