A Rich Morphological Tagger for English: Exploring the Cross-Linguistic Tradeoff Between Morphology and Syntax
Christo Kirov, John Sylak-Glassman, Rebecca Knowles, Ryan Cotterell, Matt Post
Abstract
A traditional claim in linguistics is that all human languages are equally expressive—able to convey the same wide range of meanings. Morphologically rich languages, such as Czech, rely on overt inflectional and derivational morphology to convey many semantic distinctions. Languages with comparatively limited morphology, such as English, should be able to accomplish the same using a combination of syntactic and contextual cues. We capitalize on this idea by training a tagger for English that uses syntactic features obtained by automatic parsing to recover complex morphological tags projected from Czech. The high accuracy of the resulting model provides quantitative confirmation of the underlying linguistic hypothesis of equal expressivity, and bodes well for future improvements in downstream HLT tasks including machine translation.- Anthology ID:
- E17-2018
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Valencia, Spain
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 112–117
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/E17-2018
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Christo Kirov, John Sylak-Glassman, Rebecca Knowles, Ryan Cotterell, and Matt Post. 2017. A Rich Morphological Tagger for English: Exploring the Cross-Linguistic Tradeoff Between Morphology and Syntax. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 112–117, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Rich Morphological Tagger for English: Exploring the Cross-Linguistic Tradeoff Between Morphology and Syntax (Kirov et al., EACL 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/E17-2018.pdf
- Data
- Penn Treebank