Case Studies in the Automatic Characterization of Grammars from Small Wordlists
Jordan Kodner, Spencer Kaplan, Hongzhi Xu, Mitchell P. Marcus, Charles D Yang · 2017
We present two novel examples of simple algorithms which characterize the grammars of low-resource languages: a tool for the characterization of vowel harmony, and a framework for unsupervised morphological segmentation which achieves state-of-the-art performance.Accurate characterization of grammars jump starts the process of description by a trained linguist.Furthermore, morphological segmentation provides gains in machine translation as well, a perennial challenge for low-resource undocumented and endangered languages.