Abstract
We apply to the under-resourced language Ch’ol the Womb Grammar Model of grammar induction (WGM), thus called because given appropriate input it can generate grammars for different languages, much as human wombs can generate different races. The WGM is inferential, works for more than just specific tasks and needs neither a pre-specified model family, nor parallel corpora, nor any of the typical models of machine learning. It generates an understudied language’s grammar using representative and correct input sentences in that language, together with its lexicon relevant to that input, all of which is parsed with respect to the correct grammar of a well-studied language, or alternatively, of a “universal” grammar. The errors that inevitably result serve to guide the production of the desired grammar. We present the main framework describing the model and the results of our experiments, inferring Ch’ol grammar from English grammar and suggest some future lines of research in the area.
This paper has been supported by projects PAPIIT-UNAM TA400121, CONACYT CB A1-S-27780 and by V. Dahl’s research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada NSERC grant 31611021.
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The name Womb Grammars came to Dahl’s mind after chancing upon a quote by Churchill that praised Canadians as “virile people” (sic). The thought that such fallacies of composition could be repeated unblushingly, and that there were no female equivalents of expressions such as “seminal contribution”, suggested to her that it was time to create praising associations with female-specific terms too. “Womb Grammars” hints at the analogy between human wombs, which can generate different races given appropriate input, and the system she was naming, which can generate different languages’ grammars given appropriate linguistic input.
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Appendix I: Examples of Ch’ol Given to the Program, with the PoS Tagging and the English Translation
Appendix I: Examples of Ch’ol Given to the Program, with the PoS Tagging and the English Translation
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Dahl, V., Bel-Enguix, G., Tirado, V., Miralles, E. (2023). Grammar Induction for Under-Resourced Languages: The Case of Ch’ol. In: Lopez-Garcia, P., Gallagher, J.P., Giacobazzi, R. (eds) Analysis, Verification and Transformation for Declarative Programming and Intelligent Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13160. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31476-6_6
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