Gregory Baker


2022

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Number Theory Meets Linguistics: Modelling Noun Pluralisation Across 1497 Languages Using 2-adic Metrics
Gregory Baker | Diego Molla
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A simple machine learning model of pluralisation as a linear regression problem minimising a p-adic metric substantially outperforms even the most robust of Euclidean-space regressors on languages in the Indo-European, Austronesian, Trans New-Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Nilo-Saharan, Oto-Meanguean and Atlantic-Congo language families. There is insufficient evidence to support modelling distinct noun declensions as a p-adic neighbourhood even in Indo-European languages.

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The Construction and Evaluation of the LEAFTOP Dataset of Automatically Extracted Nouns in 1480 Languages
Gregory Baker | Diego Molla
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The LEAFTOP (language extracted automatically from thousands of passages) dataset consists of nouns that appear in multiple places in the four gospels of the New Testament. We use a naive approach — probabilistic inference — to identify likely translations in 1480 other languages. We evaluate this process and find that it provides lexiconaries with accuracy from 42% (Korafe) to 99% (Runyankole), averaging 72% correct across evaluated languages. The process translates up to 161 distinct lemmas from Koine Greek (average 159). We identify nouns which appear to be easy and hard to translate, language families where this technique works, and future possible improvements and extensions. The claims to novelty are: the use of a Koine Greek New Testament as the source language; using a fully-annotated manually-created grammatically parse of the source text; a custom scraper for texts in the target languages; a new metric for language similarity; a novel strategy for evaluation on low-resource languages.
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