A Cautious Generalization Goes a Long Way: Learning Morphophonological Rules
Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne, Jordan Kodner, Ellen Broselow, Owen Rambow
Abstract
Explicit linguistic knowledge, encoded by resources such as rule-based morphological analyzers, continues to prove useful in downstream NLP tasks, especially for low-resource languages and dialects. Rules are an important asset in descriptive linguistic grammars. However, creating such resources is usually expensive and non-trivial, especially for spoken varieties with no written standard. In this work, we present a novel approach for automatically learning morphophonological rules of Arabic from a corpus. Motivated by classic cognitive models for rule learning, rules are generalized cautiously. Rules that are memorized for individual items are only allowed to generalize to unseen forms if they are sufficiently reliable in the training data. The learned rules are further examined to ensure that they capture true linguistic phenomena described by domain experts. We also investigate the learnability of rules in low-resource settings across different experimental setups and dialects.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.101
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1793–1805
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.101
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.101
- Cite (ACL):
- Salam Khalifa, Sarah Payne, Jordan Kodner, Ellen Broselow, and Owen Rambow. 2023. A Cautious Generalization Goes a Long Way: Learning Morphophonological Rules. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1793–1805, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Cautious Generalization Goes a Long Way: Learning Morphophonological Rules (Khalifa et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.101.pdf