Well-Defined Morphology is Sentence-Level Morphology

Omer Goldman, Reut Tsarfaty


Abstract
Morphological tasks have gained decent popularity within the NLP community in the recent years, with large multi-lingual datasets providing morphological analysis of words, either in or out of context. However, the lack of a clear linguistic definition for words destines the annotative work to be incomplete and mired in inconsistencies, especially cross-linguistically. In this work we expand morphological inflection of words to inflection of sentences to provide true universality disconnected from orthographic traditions of white-space usage. To allow annotation for sentence-inflection we define a morphological annotation scheme by a fixed set of inflectional features. We present a small cross-linguistic dataset including semi-manually generated simple sentences in 4 typologically diverse languages annotated according to our suggested scheme, and show that the task of reinflection gets substantially more difficult but that the change of scope from words to well-defined sentences allows interface with contextualized language models.
Anthology ID:
2021.mrl-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Venue:
MRL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
248–250
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.mrl-1.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.mrl-1.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Omer Goldman and Reut Tsarfaty. 2021. Well-Defined Morphology is Sentence-Level Morphology. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning, pages 248–250, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Well-Defined Morphology is Sentence-Level Morphology (Goldman & Tsarfaty, MRL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.mrl-1.23.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.mrl-1.23.mp4