Structured, complete inflectional paradigm data exists for very few of the world's languages, but is crucial to training morphological analysis tools. We present methods inspired by linguistic fieldwork for gathering inflectional paradigm data in a machine-readable, interoperable format from remotely-located speakers of any language. Informants are tasked with completing language-specific paradigm elicitation templates. Templates are constructed by linguists using grammatical reference materials to ensure completeness. Each cell in a template is associated with contextual prompts designed to help informants with varying levels of linguistic expertise (from professional translators to untrained native speakers) provide the desired inflected form. To facilitate downstream use in interoperable NLP/HLT applications, each cell is also associated with a language-independent machine-readable set of morphological tags from the UniMorph Schema. This data is useful for seeding morphological analysis and generation software, particularly when the data is representative of the range of surface morphological variation in the language. At present, we have obtained 792 lemmas and 25,056 inflected forms from 15 languages.
@InProceedings{SYLAKGLASSMAN16.1031,
author = {John Sylak-Glassman and Christo Kirov and David Yarowsky}, title = {Remote Elicitation of Inflectional Paradigms to Seed Morphological Analysis in Low-Resource Languages}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
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