Derivational Morphological Relations in Word Embeddings
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing derivational morphology in morphologically rich languages like Czech, but it is incremental as it applies existing embedding methods to a new dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying derivational morphological relations in Czech using word embeddings, and found that unsupervised clustering of embedding differences largely matches manually annotated semantic categories, such as grouping 'bake--baker' with 'govern--governor'.
Derivation is a type of a word-formation process which creates new words from existing ones by adding, changing or deleting affixes. In this paper, we explore the potential of word embeddings to identify properties of word derivations in the morphologically rich Czech language. We extract derivational relations between pairs of words from DeriNet, a Czech lexical network, which organizes almost one million Czech lemmata into derivational trees. For each such pair, we compute the difference of the embeddings of the two words, and perform unsupervised clustering of the resulting vectors. Our results show that these clusters largely match manually annotated semantic categories of the derivational relations (e.g. the relation 'bake--baker' belongs to category 'actor', and a correct clustering puts it into the same cluster as 'govern--governor').