Title |
Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages |
Authors |
Peter Baumann and Janet Pierrehumbert |
Abstract |
The world-wide proliferation of digital communications has created the need for language and speech processing systems for under-resourced languages. Developing such systems is challenging if only small data sets are available, and the problem is exacerbated for languages with highly productive morphology. However, many under-resourced languages are spoken in multi-lingual environments together with at least one resource-rich language and thus have numerous borrowings from resource-rich languages. Based on this insight, we argue that readily available resources from resource-rich languages can be used to bootstrap the morphological analyses of under-resourced languages with complex and productive morphological systems. In a case study of two such languages, Tagalog and Zulu, we show that an easily obtainable English wordlist can be deployed to seed a morphological analysis algorithm from a small training set of conversational transcripts. Our method achieves a precision of 100% and identifies 28 and 66 of the most productive affixes in Tagalog and Zulu, respectively. |
Topics |
Multilinguality, Corpus (Creation, Annotation, etc.) |
Full paper |
Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages |
Bibtex |
@InProceedings{BAUMANN14.1051,
author = {Peter Baumann and Janet Pierrehumbert}, title = {Using Resource-Rich Languages to Improve Morphological Analysis of Under-Resourced Languages}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)}, year = {2014}, month = {may}, date = {26-31}, address = {Reykjavik, Iceland}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Hrafn Loftsson and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-8-4}, language = {english} } |