Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages

Peter Baumann, Janet Pierrehumbert

Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
L14-1035
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3355–3359
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1051_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peter Baumann and Janet Pierrehumbert. 2014. Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3355–3359, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages (Baumann & Pierrehumbert, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1051_Paper.pdf
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