2025
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Frequency matters: Modeling irregular morphological patterns in Spanish with Transformers
Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao
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Kevin Tang
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Dinah Baer-Henney
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Over the past decade, various studies have addressed how speakers solve the so-called ‘The Paradigm Cell Filling Problem’ (PCFP) (CITATION) across different languages. The PCFP addresses a fundamental question in morphological processing: how do speakers accurately generate inflected forms of words when presented with incomplete paradigms? This problem is particularly salient when modeling complex inflectional systems. We focus on Spanish verbal paradigms, where certain verbs follow an irregular L-shaped pattern, where the first-person singular present indicative stem matches the stem used throughout the present subjunctive mood. We formulate the problem as a morphological reinflection task. Specifically, we investigate the role of input frequency in the acquisition of regular versus irregular L-shaped patterns in transformer models. By systematically manipulating the input distributions and analyzing model behavior, we reveal four key findings: 1) Models perform better on L-shaped verbs compared to regular verbs, especially in uneven frequency conditions; 2) Robust primacy effects are observed, but no consistent recency effects; 3) Memorization becomes more prominent as the proportion of L-shaped verbs increases; 4) There is a tendency to regularize L-shaped verbs when their consonant alternation pairs are rare or absent in the training data.
2024
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KlarTextCoders at StaGE: Automatic Statement Annotations for German Easy Language
Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao
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Wiebke Petersen
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Anna Sophia Stein
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Emma Stein
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Hanxin Xia
Proceedings of GermEval 2024 Shared Task on Statement Segmentation in German Easy Language (StaGE)
2023
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Linear Discriminative Learning: a competitive non-neural baseline for morphological inflection
Cheonkam Jeong
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Dominic Schmitz
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Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao
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Anna Stein
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Kevin Tang
Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
This paper presents our submission to the SIGMORPHON 2023 task 2 of Cognitively Plausible Morphophonological Generalization in Korean. We implemented both Linear Discriminative Learning and Transformer models and found that the Linear Discriminative Learning model trained on a combination of corpus and experimental data showed the best performance with the overall accuracy of around 83%. We found that the best model must be trained on both corpus data and the experimental data of one particular participant. Our examination of speaker-variability and speaker-specific information did not explain why a particular participant combined well with the corpus data. We recommend Linear Discriminative Learning models as a future non-neural baseline system, owning to its training speed, accuracy, model interpretability and cognitive plausibility. In order to improve the model performance, we suggest using bigger data and/or performing data augmentation and incorporating speaker- and item-specifics considerably.
2022
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HeiMorph at SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morphological Acquisition Trajectories
Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao
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Yulia Zinova
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Kevin Tang
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Ruben van de Vijver
Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
This paper presents the submission by the HeiMorph team to the SIGMORPHON 2022 task 2 of Morphological Acquisition Trajectories. Across all experimental conditions, we have found no evidence for the so-called Ushaped development trajectory. Our submitted systems achieve an average test accuracies of 55.5% on Arabic, 67% on German and 73.38% on English. We found that, bigram hallucination provides better inferences only for English and Arabic and only when the number of hallucinations remains low.