Sarah Ruth Brogden Payne


2023

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Exploring Linguistic Probes for Morphological Generalization
Jordan Kodner | Salam Khalifa | Sarah Ruth Brogden Payne
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Modern work on the cross-linguistic computational modeling of morphological inflection has typically employed language-independent data splitting algorithms. In this paper, we supplement that approach with language-specific probes designed to test aspects of morphological generalization. Testing these probes on three morphologically distinct languages, English, Spanish, and Swahili, we find evidence that three leading morphological inflection systems employ distinct generalization strategies over conjugational classes and feature sets on both orthographic and phonologically transcribed inputs.