Unsupervised Word Class Induction for Under-resourced Languages: A Case Study on Indonesian
Meladel Mistica, Jey Han Lau, Timothy J. Baldwin · 2013
In this study we investigate how we can learn both: (a) syntactic classes that cap-ture the range of predicate argument struc-tures (PASs) of a word and the syntactic alternations it participates in, but ignore large semantic differences in the compo-nent words; and (b) syntactico-semantic classes that capture PAS and alternation properties, but are also semantically co-herent (a la Levin classes). We focus on Indonesian as our case study, a language that is spoken by more than 165 million speakers, but is nonetheless rela-tively under-resourced in terms of NLP. In particular, we focus on the syntactic varia-tion that arises with the affixing of the In-donesian suffix-kan, which varies accord-ing to the kind of stem it attaches to. 1