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Don’t Forget the Long Tail! A Comprehensive Analysis of Morphological Generalization in Bilingual Lexicon Induction

Paula Czarnowska, Sebastian Ruder, Edouard Grave, Ryan Cotterell, Ann Copestake


Abstract
Human translators routinely have to translate rare inflections of words – due to the Zipfian distribution of words in a language. When translating from Spanish, a good translator would have no problem identifying the proper translation of a statistically rare inflection such as habláramos. Note the lexeme itself, hablar, is relatively common. In this work, we investigate whether state-of-the-art bilingual lexicon inducers are capable of learning this kind of generalization. We introduce 40 morphologically complete dictionaries in 10 languages and evaluate three of the best performing models on the task of translation of less frequent morphological forms. We demonstrate that the performance of state-of-the-art models drops considerably when evaluated on infrequent morphological inflections and then show that adding a simple morphological constraint at training time improves the performance, proving that the bilingual lexicon inducers can benefit from better encoding of morphology.
Anthology ID:
D19-1090
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
974–983
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1090
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1090
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paula Czarnowska, Sebastian Ruder, Edouard Grave, Ryan Cotterell, and Ann Copestake. 2019. Don’t Forget the Long Tail! A Comprehensive Analysis of Morphological Generalization in Bilingual Lexicon Induction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 974–983, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Don’t Forget the Long Tail! A Comprehensive Analysis of Morphological Generalization in Bilingual Lexicon Induction (Czarnowska et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1090.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1090.Attachment.zip