Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation for Low-Resource Polysynthetic Languages

Abstract

Polysynthetic languages pose a challenge for morphological analysis due to the root-morpheme complexity and to the word class ``squish''. In addition, many of these polysynthetic languages are low-resource. We propose unsupervised approaches for morphological segmentation of low-resource polysynthetic languages based on Adaptor Grammars (AG) (Eskander et al., 2016). We experiment with four languages from the Uto-Aztecan family. Our AG-based approaches outperform other unsupervised approaches and show promise when compared to supervised methods, outperforming them on two of the four languages.

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Reproductions