Linguistic fieldwork is an important component in language documentation and the creation of comprehensive linguistic corpora. Despite its significance, the process is often lengthy, exhaustive, and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel model that guides a linguist during the fieldwork and accounts for the dynamics of linguist-speaker interactions. We introduce a novel framework that evaluates the efficiency of various sampling strategies for obtaining morphological data and assesses the effectiveness of state-of-the-art neural models in generalising morphological structures. Our experiments highlight two key strategies for improving the efficiency: (1) increasing the diversity of annotated data by uniform sampling among the cells of the paradigm tables, and (2) using model confidence as a guide to enhance positive interaction by providing reliable predictions during annotation.

The paper presents Anlirika’s submission to SIGTYP 2021 Shared Task on Robust Spoken Language Identification. The task aims at building a robust system that generalizes well across different domains and speakers. The training data is limited to a single domain only with predominantly single speaker per language while the validation and test data samples are derived from diverse dataset and multiple speakers. We experiment with a neural system comprising a combination of dense, convolutional, and recurrent layers that are designed to perform better generalization and obtain speaker-invariant representations. We demonstrate that the task in its constrained form (without making use of external data or augmentation the train set with samples from the validation set) is still challenging. Our best system trained on the data augmented with validation samples achieves 29.9% accuracy on the test data.

The paper describes the University of Melbourne’s submission to the SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task 0: Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection. Our team submitted three systems in total, two neural and one non-neural. Our analysis of systems’ performance shows positive effects of newly introduced data hallucination technique that we employed in one of neural systems, especially in low-resource scenarios. A non-neural system based on observed inflection patterns shows optimistic results even in its simple implementation (>75% accuracy for 50% of languages). With possible improvement within the same modeling principle, accuracy might grow to values above 90%.