The world-wide proliferation of digital communications has created the need for language and speech processing systems for under-resourced languages. Developing such systems is challenging if only small data sets are available, and the problem is exacerbated for languages with highly productive morphology. However, many under-resourced languages are spoken in multi-lingual environments together with at least one resource-rich language and thus have numerous borrowings from resource-rich languages. Based on this insight, we argue that readily available resources from resource-rich languages can be used to bootstrap the morphological analyses of under-resourced languages with complex and productive morphological systems. In a case study of two such languages, Tagalog and Zulu, we show that an easily obtainable English wordlist can be deployed to seed a morphological analysis algorithm from a small training set of conversational transcripts. Our method achieves a precision of 100% and identifies 28 and 66 of the most productive affixes in Tagalog and Zulu, respectively.

Parser evaluation traditionally relies on evaluation metrics which deliver a single aggregate score over all sentences in the parser output, such as PARSEVAL. However, for the evaluation of parser performance concerning a particular phenomenon, a test suite of sentences is needed in which this phenomenon has been identified. In recent years, the parsing of discontinuous structures has received a rising interest. Therefore, in this paper, we present a test suite for testing the performance of dependency and constituency parsers on non-projective dependencies and discontinuous constituents for German. The test suite is based on the newly released TIGER treebank version 2.2. It provides a unique possibility of benchmarking parsers on non-local syntactic relationships in German, for constituents and dependencies. We include a linguistic analysis of the phenomena that cause discontinuity in the TIGER annotation, thereby closing gaps in previous literature. The linguistic phenomena we investigate include extraposition, a placeholder/repeated element construction, topicalization, scrambling, local movement, parentheticals, and fronting of pronouns.