Phonotactics as an Aid in Low Resource Loan Word Detection and Morphological Analysis in Sakha

Petter Mæhlum, Sardana Ivanova


Abstract
Obtaining information about loan words and irregular morphological patterns can be difficult for low-resource languages. Using Sakha as an example, we show that it is possible to exploit known phonemic regularities such as vowel harmony and consonant distributions to identify loan words and irregular patterns, which can be helpful in rule-based downstream tasks such as parsing and POS-tagging. We evaluate phonemically inspired methods for loanword detection, combined with bi-gram vowel transition probabilities to inspect irregularities in the morphology of loanwords. We show that both these techniques can be useful for the detection of such patterns. Finally, we inspect the plural suffix -ЛАр [-LAr] to observe some of the variation in morphology between native and foreign words.
Anthology ID:
2023.resourceful-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2023)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Tórshavn, the Faroe Islands
Editors:
Nikolai Ilinykh, Felix Morger, Dana Dannélls, Simon Dobnik, Beáta Megyesi, Joakim Nivre
Venue:
RESOURCEFUL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
111–120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.resourceful-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Petter Mæhlum and Sardana Ivanova. 2023. Phonotactics as an Aid in Low Resource Loan Word Detection and Morphological Analysis in Sakha. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2023), pages 111–120, Tórshavn, the Faroe Islands. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Phonotactics as an Aid in Low Resource Loan Word Detection and Morphological Analysis in Sakha (Mæhlum & Ivanova, RESOURCEFUL 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.resourceful-1.14.pdf