Morpho-syntactic lexicons provide information about the morphological and syntactic roles of words in a language. Such lexicons are not available for all languages and even when available, their coverage can be limited. We present a graph-based semi-supervised learning method that uses the morphological, syntactic and semantic relations between words to automatically construct wide coverage lexicons from small seed sets. Our method is language-independent, and we show that we can expand a 1000 word seed lexicon to more than 100 times its size with high quality for 11 languages. In addition, the automatically created lexicons provide features that improve performance in two downstream tasks: morphological tagging and dependency parsing.
One alternative method to extract morphosyntactic lexicons is via parallel data @cite_16 . However, such methods assume that both the source and target langauges are isomorphic with respect to morphology. This can be the case with attributes like coarse part-of-speech or case, but is rarely true for other attributes like gender, which is very language specific.
@cite_16
2251670681 2121963504 274041255 2250220874
We discuss data-driven morphological segmentation, in which word forms are segmented into morphs, the surface forms of morphemes. Our focus is on a lowresource learning setting, in which only a small amount of annotated word forms are available for model training, while unannotated word forms are available in abundance. The current state-of-art methods 1) exploit both the annotated and unannotated data in a semi-supervised manner, and 2) learn morph lexicons and subsequently uncover segmentations by generating the most likely morph sequences. In contrast, we discuss 1) employing only the annotated data in a supervised manner, while entirely ignoring the unannotated data, and 2) directly learning to predict morph boundaries given their local sub-string contexts instead of learning the morph lexicons. Specifically, we employ conditional random fields, a popular discriminative log-linear model for segmentation. We present experiments on two data sets comprising five diverse languages. We show that the fully supervised boundary prediction approach outperforms the state-of-art semi-supervised morph lexicon approaches on all languages when using the same annotated data sets. While most approaches to unsupervised morphology acquisition often rely on metrics based on information theory for identifying morphemes, we describe a novel approach relying on the notion of formal analogy, that is, a relation between four forms, such as: reader is to doer as reading is to doing. Our assumption is that formal analogies identify pairs of morphologically related words, for instance reader reading and doer doing. Based on this assumption, our approach simply consists in identifying all the formal analogies involving the words in a lexicon. It turned out that for large lexicons, this happens to be a very time consuming task. Therefore, we report our attempts in designing practical systems based on the analogical principle. We applied our systems on the five languages of the shared task. The learning is made in an unsupervised manner, making use of the supplied lexicons only. We present statistical models for morphological disambiguation in agglutinative languages, with a specific application to Turkish. Turkish presents an interesting problem for statistical models as the potential tag set size is very large because of the productive derivational morphology. We propose to handle this by breaking up the morphosyntactic tags into inflectional groups, each of which contains the inflectional features for each (intermediate) derived form. Our statistical models score the probability of each morphosyntactic tag by considering statistics over the individual inflectional groups and surface roots in trigram models. Among the four models that we have developed and tested, the simplest model ignoring the local morphotactics within words performs the best. Our best trigram model performs with 93.95 accuracy on our test data getting all the morhosyntactic and semantic features correct. If we are just interested in syntactically relevant features and ignore a very small set of semantic features, then the accuracy increases to 95.07 . Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the task of automatically producing natural language text to describe information present in non-linguistic data. It involves three main subtasks: (i) selecting the relevant portion of input data; (ii) determining the words that will be used to verbalise the selected data; and (iii) mapping these words into natural language text. The latter task is known as Surface Realisation (SR). In my thesis, I study the SR task in the context of input data coming from Knowledge Bases (KB). I present two novel approaches to surface realisation from knowledge bases: a supervised approach and a weakly supervised approach. In the first, supervised, approach, I present a corpus-based method for inducing a Feature Based Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (FB-LTAG) from a parallel corpus of text and data. The resulting grammar includes a unification based semantics and can be used by an existing surface realiser to generate sentences from test data. I show that the induced grammar is compact and generalises well over the test data yielding results that are close to those produced by a handcrafted symbolic approach and which outperform an alternative statistical approach. In the weakly supervised approach, I explore a method for surface realisation from KB data which uses a supplied lexicon but does not require a parallel corpus. Instead, I build a corpus from heterogeneous sources of domain-related text and use it to identify possible lexicalisations of KB symbols (classes and relations) and their verbalisation patterns (frames). Based on the observations made, I build different probabilistic models which are used for selection of appropriate frames and syntax semantics linking while verbalising KB inputs. I evaluate the output sentences and analyse the issues relevant to learning from non-parallel corpora. In both these approaches, I use the data derived from an existing biomedical ontology as a reference input. The proposed methods are generic and can be easily adapted for input from other ontologies for which a parallel non-parallel corpora exists.