The 2022 SIGMORPHON–UniMorph shared task on large scale morphological inflection generation included a wide range of typologically diverse languages: 33 languages from 11 top-level language families: Arabic (Modern Standard), Assamese, Braj, Chukchi, Eastern Armenian, Evenki, Georgian, Gothic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hungarian, Itelmen, Karelian, Kazakh, Ket, Khalkha Mongolian, Kholosi, Korean, Lamahalot, Low German, Ludic, Magahi, Middle Low German, Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Polish, Pomak, Slovak, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Veps, and Xibe. We emphasize generalization along different dimensions this year by evaluating test items with unseen lemmas and unseen features separately under small and large training conditions. Across the five submitted systems and two baselines, the prediction of inflections with unseen features proved challenging, with average performance decreased substantially from last year. This was true even for languages for which the forms were in principle predictable, which suggests that further work is needed in designing systems that capture the various types of generalization required for the world’s languages.

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation, and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements on several fronts that were made in the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g., missing gender and macrons information. We have amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive.In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

In recent years, a flurry of morphological datasets had emerged, most notably UniMorph, aa multi-lingual repository of inflection tables. However, the flat structure of the current morphological annotation makes the treatment of some languages quirky, if not impossible, specifically in cases of polypersonal agreement. In this paper we propose a general solution for such cases and expand the UniMorph annotation schema to naturally address this phenomenon, in which verbs agree with multiple arguments using true affixes. We apply this extended schema to one such language, Georgian, and provide a human-verified, accurate and balanced morphological dataset for Georgian verbs. The dataset has 4 times more tables and 6 times more verb forms compared to the existing UniMorph dataset, covering all possible variants of argument marking, demonstrating the adequacy of our proposed scheme. Experiments on a reinflection task show that generalization is easy when the data is split at the form level, but extremely hard when splitting along lemma lines. Expanding the other languages in UniMorph according to this schema is expected to improve both the coverage, consistency and interpretability of this benchmark.

In the domain of Morphology, Inflection is a fundamental and important task that gained a lot of traction in recent years, mostly via SIGMORPHON’s shared-tasks.With average accuracy above 0.9 over the scores of all languages, the task is considered mostly solved using relatively generic neural seq2seq models, even with little data provided.In this work, we propose to re-evaluate morphological inflection models by employing harder train-test splits that will challenge the generalization capacity of the models. In particular, as opposed to the naïve split-by-form, we propose a split-by-lemma method to challenge the performance on existing benchmarks.Our experiments with the three top-ranked systems on the SIGMORPHON’s 2020 shared-task show that the lemma-split presents an average drop of 30 percentage points in macro-average for the 90 languages included. The effect is most significant for low-resourced languages with a drop as high as 95 points, but even high-resourced languages lose about 10 points on average. Our results clearly show that generalizing inflection to unseen lemmas is far from being solved, presenting a simple yet effective means to promote more sophisticated models.

The 2022 Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Shared Task was dedicated to clause-level morphology. As the first ever benchmark that defines and evaluates morphology outside its traditional lexical boundaries, the shared task on multilingual clause-level morphology sets the scene for competition across different approaches to morphological modeling, with 3 clause-level sub-tasks: morphological inflection, reinflection and analysis, where systems are required to generate, manipulate or analyze simple sentences centered around a single content lexeme and a set of morphological features characterizing its syntactic clause. This year’s tasks covered eight typologically distinct languages: English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and Turkish. The tasks has received submissions of four systems from three teams which were compared to two baselines implementing prominent multilingual learning methods. The results show that modern NLP models are effective in solving morphological tasks even at the clause level. However, there is still room for improvement, especially in the task of morphological analysis.

Neural models for the various flavours of morphological reinflection tasks have proven to be extremely accurate given ample labeled data, yet labeled data may be slow and costly to obtain. In this work we aim to overcome this annotation bottleneck by bootstrapping labeled data from a seed as small as five labeled inflection tables, accompanied by a large bulk of unlabeled text. Our bootstrapping method exploits the orthographic and semantic regularities in morphological systems in a two-phased setup, where word tagging based on analogies is followed by word pairing based on distances. Our experiments with the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem over eight typologically different languages show that in languages with relatively simple morphology, orthographic regularities on their own allow inflection models to achieve respectable accuracy. Combined orthographic and semantic regularities alleviate difficulties with particularly complex morpho-phonological systems. We further show that our bootstrapping methods substantially outperform hallucination-based methods commonly used for overcoming the annotation bottleneck in morphological reinflection tasks.

This year's iteration of the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on morphological reinflection focuses on typological diversity and cross-lingual variation of morphosyntactic features. In terms of the task, we enrich UniMorph with new data for 32 languages from 13 language families, with most of them being under-resourced: Kunwinjku, Classical Syriac, Arabic (Modern Standard, Egyptian, Gulf), Hebrew, Amharic, Aymara, Magahi, Braj, Kurdish (Central, Northern, Southern), Polish, Karelian, Livvi, Ludic, Veps, Võro, Evenki, Xibe, Tuvan, Sakha, Turkish, Indonesian, Kodi, Seneca, Asháninka, Yanesha, Chukchi, Itelmen, Eibela. We evaluate six systems on the new data and conduct an extensive error analysis of the systems' predictions. Transformer-based models generally demonstrate superior performance on the majority of languages, achieving >90% accuracy on 65% of them. The languages on which systems yielded low accuracy are mainly under-resourced, with a limited amount of data. Most errors made by the systems are due to allomorphy, honorificity, and form variation. In addition, we observe that systems especially struggle to inflect multiword lemmas. The systems also produce misspelled forms or end up in repetitive loops (e.g., RNN-based models). Finally, we report a large drop in systems' performance on previously unseen lemmas.

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.

Training semantic parsers from weak supervision (denotations) rather than strong supervision (programs) complicates training in two ways. First, a large search space of potential programs needs to be explored at training time to find a correct program. Second, spurious programs that accidentally lead to a correct denotation add noise to training. In this work we propose that in closed worlds with clear semantic types, one can substantially alleviate these problems by utilizing an abstract representation, where tokens in both the language utterance and program are lifted to an abstract form. We show that these abstractions can be defined with a handful of lexical rules and that they result in sharing between different examples that alleviates the difficulties in training. To test our approach, we develop the first semantic parser for CNLVR, a challenging visual reasoning dataset, where the search space is large and overcoming spuriousness is critical, because denotations are either TRUE or FALSE, and thus random programs are likely to lead to a correct denotation. Our method substantially improves performance, and reaches 82.5% accuracy, a 14.7% absolute accuracy improvement compared to the best reported accuracy so far.