Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao

Rayyan Merchant, Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao, Kevin Tang

Despite speaking mutually intelligible varieties of the same language, speakers of Tajik Persian, written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet, cannot read Iranian and Afghan texts written in the Perso-Arabic script. As the vast majority of Persian text on the Internet is written in Perso-Arabic, monolingual Tajik speakers are unable to interface with the Internet in any meaningful way. Due to overwhelming similarity between the formal registers of these dialects and the scarcity of Tajik-Farsi parallel data, machine transliteration has been proposed as more a practical and appropriate solution than machine translation. This paper presents a transformer-based G2P approach to Tajik-Farsi transliteration, achieving chrF++ scores of 58.70 (Farsi to Tajik) and 74.20 (Tajik to Farsi) on novel digraphic datasets, setting a comparable baseline metric for future work. Our results also demonstrate the non-trivial difficulty of this task in both directions. We also provide an overview of the differences between the two scripts and the challenges they present, so as to aid future efforts in Tajik-Farsi transliteration.

Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao, Kevin Tang, Dinah Baer-Henney

Over the past decade, various studies have addressed how speakers solve the so-called `The Paradigm Cell Filling Problem' (PCFP) \citep{ackerman2009parts} across different languages. The PCFP addresses a fundamental question in morphological processing: how do speakers accurately generate inflected forms of words when presented with incomplete paradigms? This problem is particularly salient when modeling complex inflectional systems. We focus on Spanish verbal paradigms, where certain verbs follow an irregular L-shaped pattern, where the first-person singular present indicative stem matches the stem used throughout the present subjunctive mood. We formulate the problem as a morphological reinflection task. Specifically, we investigate the role of input frequency in the acquisition of regular versus irregular L-shaped patterns in transformer models. By systematically manipulating the input distributions and analyzing model behavior, we reveal four key findings: 1) Models perform better on L-shaped verbs compared to regular verbs, especially in uneven frequency conditions; 2) Robust primacy effects are observed, but no consistent recency effects; 3) Memorization becomes more prominent as the proportion of L-shaped verbs increases; 4) There is a tendency to regularize L-shaped verbs when their consonant alternation pairs are rare or absent in the training data.

Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao

We present a mobile and desktop keyboard suite for Idu Mishmi, an endangered Trans-Himalayan language spoken by approximately 11,000 people in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Although a Latin-based orthography was developed in 2018, no digital input tools existed to use it, forcing speakers into ad-hoc romanizations that cannot represent the full writing system. Our keyboards comprise two tools: (1) an Android mobile keyboard, published on the Google Play Store and actively used in teacher training programs, and (2) a Windows desktop keyboard currently undergoing community testing. Both tools support the complete Idu Mishmi character inventory, including schwa, retracted schwa, nasalized vowels, and accented forms. Both operate fully offline with zero network permissions, addressing connectivity constraints and data sovereignty concerns. We describe the design, implementation, and deployment as a replicable model for other endangered language communities.

Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao, Kevin Tang, Dinah Baer-Henney

Whether neural networks can serve as cognitive models of morphological learning remains an open question. Recent work has shown that encoder-decoder models can acquire irregular patterns, but evidence that they generalize these patterns like humans is mixed. We investigate this using the Spanish \emph{L-shaped morphome}, where only the first-person singular indicative (e.g., \textit{pongo} `I put') shares its stem with all subjunctive forms (e.g., \textit{ponga, pongas}) despite lacking apparent phonological, semantic, or syntactic motivation. We compare five encoder-decoder transformers varying along two dimensions: sequential vs. position-invariant positional encoding, and atomic vs. decomposed tag representations. Positional encoding proves decisive: position-invariant models recover the correct L-shaped paradigm clustering even when L-shaped verbs are scarce in training, whereas sequential positional encoding models only partially capture the pattern. Yet none of the models productively generalize this pattern to novel forms. Position-invariant models generalize the L-shaped stem across subjunctive cells but fail to extend it to the first-person singular indicative, producing a mood-based generalization rather than the L-shaped morphomic pattern. Humans do the opposite, generalizing preferentially to the first-person singular indicative over subjunctive forms. None of the models reproduce the human pattern, highlighting the gap between statistical pattern reproduction and morphological abstraction.

Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao, Kevin Tang, Dinah Baer-Henney

This study investigates the cognitive plausibility of the Spanish irregular morphomic pattern by directly comparing transformer-based neural networks to human behavioral data from \citet{Nevins2015TheRA}. Using the same analytical framework as the original human study, we evaluate whether transformer models can replicate human-like sensitivity to a complex linguistic phenomena, the morphome, under controlled input conditions. Our experiments focus on three frequency conditions: natural, low-frequency, and high-frequency distributions of verbs exhibiting irregular morphomic patterns. While the models outperformed humans in stem and suffix accuracy, a clear divergence emerged in response preferences. Unlike humans, who consistently favored natural responses across all test items, models' preferred irregular responses and were influenced by the proportion of irregular verbs in their training data. Additionally, models trained on the natural and low-frequency distributions, but not the high-frequency distribution, were sensitive to the phonological similarity between test items and real Spanish L-shaped verbs.