Frugal Paradigm Completion

Alex Erdmann
Christian Schallhart
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2020), pp. 8248-8273

Abstract

Lexica distinguishing all morphologically related forms of each lexeme are crucial to many language technologies, yet building them is expensive. We propose Frugal Paradigm Completion, an approach that predicts all related forms in a morphological paradigm from as few manually provided forms as possible. It induces typological information during training which it uses to determine the best sources at test time. We evaluate our language-agnostic approach on 7 diverse languages. Compared to popular alternative approaches, our Frugal Paradigm Completion approach reduces manual labor by 16-63% and
is the most robust to typological variation.