Unsupervised Learning of the Morphology of a Natural Language

Unsupervised Learning of the Morphology of a Natural Language

2001 | John Goldsmith
This study explores the unsupervised learning of morphological segmentation in European languages using minimum description length (MDL) analysis. The research develops heuristics to rapidly construct a probabilistic morphological grammar and uses MDL to evaluate the proposed modifications. The resulting grammar aligns well with human morphological analysis. The study also discusses the relationship between MDL grammatical analysis and evaluation metrics in early generative grammar. The program, called Linguistica, takes a text file as input and produces a partial morphological analysis, aiming to match the analysis of a human morphologist. The MDL framework focuses on finding the most compact representation of data, which is crucial for linguistic analysis. The novelty lies in using simple morphological patterns (signatures) to quantify MDL and build a satisfactory morphological grammar. The system is designed to handle large corpora and can be applied to a wide range of European languages. The paper also reviews previous research in automatic morphological analysis, highlighting the strengths and limitations of different approaches, and discusses the development of the MDL-based algorithm.This study explores the unsupervised learning of morphological segmentation in European languages using minimum description length (MDL) analysis. The research develops heuristics to rapidly construct a probabilistic morphological grammar and uses MDL to evaluate the proposed modifications. The resulting grammar aligns well with human morphological analysis. The study also discusses the relationship between MDL grammatical analysis and evaluation metrics in early generative grammar. The program, called Linguistica, takes a text file as input and produces a partial morphological analysis, aiming to match the analysis of a human morphologist. The MDL framework focuses on finding the most compact representation of data, which is crucial for linguistic analysis. The novelty lies in using simple morphological patterns (signatures) to quantify MDL and build a satisfactory morphological grammar. The system is designed to handle large corpora and can be applied to a wide range of European languages. The paper also reviews previous research in automatic morphological analysis, highlighting the strengths and limitations of different approaches, and discusses the development of the MDL-based algorithm.
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