Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages

William Lane, Steven Bird

Abstract
Text input technologies for low-resource languages support literacy, content authoring, and language learning. However, tasks such as word completion pose a challenge for morphologically complex languages thanks to the combinatorial explosion of possible words. We have developed a method for morphologically-aware text input in Kunwinjku, a polysynthetic language of northern Australia. We modify an existing finite state recognizer to map input morph prefixes to morph completions, respecting the morphosyntax and morphophonology of the language. We demonstrate the portability of the method by applying it to Turkish. We show that the space of proximal morph completions is many orders of magnitude smaller than the space of full word completions for Kunwinjku. We provide a visualization of the morph completion space to enable the text completion parameters to be fine-tuned. Finally, we report on a web services deployment, along with a web interface which helps users enter morphologically complex words and which retrieves corresponding entries from the lexicon.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.405
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4600–4611
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.405
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.405
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
William Lane and Steven Bird. 2020. Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4600–4611, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages (Lane & Bird, COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.405.pdf
PDF Search