Abstract
Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) is a morphologically complex and predominantly prefixing language. The combinatory potential of inflectional and derivational/lexical prefixes and verb stems in Plains Cree makes it challenging for traditional auto-completion (or word suggestion) approaches to handle. The lack of a large corpus of Plains Cree also complicates the situation. This study attempts to investigate how well a BiLSTM model trained on a small Cree corpus can handle a word suggestion task. Moreover, this study evaluates whether the use of semantically and morphosyntactically refined Word2Vec embeddings can improve the overall accuracy and quality of BiLSTM suggestions. The results show that some models trained with the refined vectors provide semantically and morphosyntactically better suggestions. They are also more accurate in predictions of content words. The model trained with the non-refined vectors, in contrast, was better at predicting conjunctions, particles, and other non-inflecting words. The models trained with different refined vector combinations provide the expected next word among top-10 predictions in 36.73 to 37.88% of cases (depending on the model).- Anthology ID:
- 2024.americasnlp-1.3
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP 2024)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Manuel Mager, Abteen Ebrahimi, Shruti Rijhwani, Arturo Oncevay, Luis Chiruzzo, Robert Pugh, Katharina von der Wense
- Venues:
- AmericasNLP | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15–23
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.americasnlp-1.3
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Olga Kriukova and Antti Arppe. 2024. Word-level prediction in Plains Cree: First steps. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP 2024), pages 15–23, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Word-level prediction in Plains Cree: First steps (Kriukova & Arppe, AmericasNLP-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/jeptaln-2024-ingestion/2024.americasnlp-1.3.pdf