Charmanteau: Character Embedding Models For Portmanteau Creation
Varun Gangal, Harsh Jhamtani, Graham Neubig, Eduard H. Hovy, Eric Nyberg · 2017
Portmanteaus are a word formation phenomenon where two words are combined to form a new word.We propose character-level neural sequence-tosequence (S2S) methods for the task of portmanteau generation that are end-toend-trainable, language independent, and do not explicitly use additional phonetic information.We propose a noisy-channelstyle model, which allows for the incorporation of unsupervised word lists, improving performance over a standard sourceto-target model.This model is made possible by an exhaustive candidate generation strategy specifically enabled by the features of the portmanteau task.Experiments find our approach superior to a state-of-the-art FST-based baseline with respect to ground truth accuracy and human evaluation.