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Designing and Comparing G2P-Type Lemmatizers for a Morphology-Rich Language

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Book cover Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM 2015)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 537))

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Abstract

We consider the statistical lemmatization problem in which lemmatizers are trained on (word form, lemma) pairs. In particular, we consider this problem for ancient Latin, a language with high degree of morphological variability. We investigate whether general purpose string-to-string transduction models are suitable for this task, and find that they typically perform (much) better than more restricted lemmatization techniques/heuristics based on suffix transformations. We also experimentally test whether string transduction systems that perform well on one string-to-string translation task (here, G2P) perform well on another (here, lemmatization) and vice versa, and find that a joint n-gram modeling performs better on G2P than a discriminative model of our own making but that this relationship is reversed for lemmatization. Finally, we investigate how the learned lemmatizers can complement lexicon-based systems, e.g., by tackling the OOV and/or the disambiguation problem.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In stemming, all that typically matters is that related words map to the same (linguistic or even non-linguistic) object.

  2. 2.

    See, e.g., https://prepro.hucompute.org/.

  3. 3.

    In our experiments below, we choose an n-gram order of size 6 for Phonetisaurus. Increasing n-gram order size did not lead to better performance in preliminary tests.

  4. 4.

    We use the alignments produced by the Phonetisaurus toolkit.

  5. 5.

    Although CRFs are rather old and typically not always the best-performing sequence labeling models [17], we use them here mainly for practical reasons. In particular, the CRF package we are using, available from https://code.google.com/p/crfpp/, provides a very convenient interface to modeling sequence labeling.

  6. 6.

    Increasing window size typically does not lead to better performance, as we verified in preliminary experiments.

  7. 7.

    Typically, word forms in other word classes are also not inflectional, so that the learning problem would be trivial.

  8. 8.

    In fact, it seems that Mate simply stores input strings that occur fewer than 5 times, rather than learning substitution patterns from these (personal communication with Bernd Bohnet). Thus, the evaluation scenario adopted in this work puts Mate at a general disadvantage, since we generally train systems on arbitrary lists of word pairs selected from a lexicon rather than on the distributions found in ‘real’ text.

  9. 9.

    E.g., when the lemmatizer is developed to assist a lexicon-based lemmatizer.

  10. 10.

    We also performed the alternative decoding strategy where lemmatizers are separately trained, but found it to perform worse.

  11. 11.

    Available at http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~schmid/tools/TreeTagger/.

  12. 12.

    We could not use Perseus because the TreeTagger was trained on Perseus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Text Technology Lab, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Steffen Eger

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  1. Steffen Eger
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Correspondence to Steffen Eger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany

    Cerstin Mahlow

  2. Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, Germany

    Michael Piotrowski

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Eger, S. (2015). Designing and Comparing G2P-Type Lemmatizers for a Morphology-Rich Language. In: Mahlow, C., Piotrowski, M. (eds) Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology. SFCM 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 537. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23980-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23980-4_2

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