Natalia Krizhanovsky

Andrew Krizhanovsky, Natalia Krizhanovsky, Irina Novak

This research devoted to the low-resource Veps and Karelian languages. Algorithms for assigning part of speech tags to words and grammatical properties to words are presented in the article. These algorithms use our morphological dictionaries, where the lemma, part of speech and a set of grammatical features (gramset) are known for each word form. The algorithms are based on the analogy hypothesis that words with the same suffixes are likely to have the same inflectional models, the same part of speech and gramset. The accuracy of these algorithms were evaluated and compared. 313 thousand Vepsian and 66 thousand Karelian words were used to verify the accuracy of these algorithms. The special functions were designed to assess the quality of results of the developed algorithms. 92.4% of Vepsian words and 86.8% of Karelian words were assigned a correct part of speech by the developed algorithm. 95.3% of Vepsian words and 90.7% of Karelian words were assigned a correct gramset by our algorithm. Morphological and semantic tagging of texts, which are closely related and inseparable in our corpus processes, are described in the paper.

Ekaterina Vylomova, Jennifer White, Elizabeth Salesky et al.

A broad goal in natural language processing (NLP) is to develop a system that has the capacity to process any natural language. Most systems, however, are developed using data from just one language such as English. The SIGMORPHON 2020 shared task on morphological reinflection aims to investigate systems' ability to generalize across typologically distinct languages, many of which are low resource. Systems were developed using data from 45 languages and just 5 language families, fine-tuned with data from an additional 45 languages and 10 language families (13 in total), and evaluated on all 90 languages. A total of 22 systems (19 neural) from 10 teams were submitted to the task. All four winning systems were neural (two monolingual transformers and two massively multilingual RNN-based models with gated attention). Most teams demonstrate utility of data hallucination and augmentation, ensembles, and multilingual training for low-resource languages. Non-neural learners and manually designed grammars showed competitive and even superior performance on some languages (such as Ingrian, Tajik, Tagalog, Zarma, Lingala), especially with very limited data. Some language families (Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Turkic) were relatively easy for most systems and achieved over 90% mean accuracy while others were more challenging.

Natalia Krizhanovsky, Andrew Krizhanovsky

The article describes a technique for using English Wiktionary inflection tables for generating word forms for Veps verbs and nominals in the Open corpus of Veps and Karelian languages. The information concerning Karelian and Veps Wiktionary entries with inflection tables is given. The operating principle of the Wiktionary static and dynamic templates is explained with the use of the jogi (river) dictionary entry as an example. The method of constructing the inflection table in the dictionary of the VepKar corpus according to the data of the dynamic template of the English Wiktionary is presented.