AUTOLEX: An Automatic Framework for Linguistic Exploration
This work addresses the challenge for linguists in generating accurate and unbiased grammar descriptions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing linguistic analysis methods.
The authors tackled the problem of manually creating unbiased grammar descriptions by proposing AutoLEX, an automatic framework for extracting linguistic descriptions, and applied it to morphological agreement, case marking, and word order across multiple languages, with evaluation involving language experts and a proposed automated method.
Each language has its own complex systems of word, phrase, and sentence construction, the guiding principles of which are often summarized in grammar descriptions for the consumption of linguists or language learners. However, manual creation of such descriptions is a fraught process, as creating descriptions which describe the language in "its own terms" without bias or error requires both a deep understanding of the language at hand and linguistics as a whole. We propose an automatic framework AutoLEX that aims to ease linguists' discovery and extraction of concise descriptions of linguistic phenomena. Specifically, we apply this framework to extract descriptions for three phenomena: morphological agreement, case marking, and word order, across several languages. We evaluate the descriptions with the help of language experts and propose a method for automated evaluation when human evaluation is infeasible.