Mielke, Sabrina J.

1paper

1 Paper

32.0CLJun 10, 2018
Unsupervised Disambiguation of Syncretism in Inflected Lexicons

Ryan Cotterell, Christo Kirov, Sabrina J. Mielke et al.

Lexical ambiguity makes it difficult to compute various useful statistics of a corpus. A given word form might represent any of several morphological feature bundles. One can, however, use unsupervised learning (as in EM) to fit a model that probabilistically disambiguates word forms. We present such an approach, which employs a neural network to smoothly model a prior distribution over feature bundles (even rare ones). Although this basic model does not consider a token's context, that very property allows it to operate on a simple list of unigram type counts, partitioning each count among different analyses of that unigram. We discuss evaluation metrics for this novel task and report results on 5 languages.