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International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology

SFCM 2015: Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology pp 72–93Cite as

A Universal Feature Schema for Rich Morphological Annotation and Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Part-of-Speech Tagging

Part of the Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS,volume 537)

Abstract

Semantically detailed and typologically-informed morphological analysis that is broadly applicable cross-linguistically has the potential to improve many NLP applications, including machine translation, n-gram language models, information extraction, and co-reference resolution. In this paper, we present a universal morphological feature schema, which is a set of features that represent the finest distinctions in meaning that are expressed by inflectional morphology across languages. We first present the schema’s guiding theoretical principles, construction methodology, and contents. We then present a method of measuring cross-linguistic variability in the semantic distinctions conveyed by inflectional morphology along the multiple dimensions spanned by the schema. This method relies on representing inflected wordforms from many languages in our universal feature space, and then testing for agreement across multiple aligned translations of pivot words in a parallel corpus (the Bible). The results of this method are used to assess the effectiveness of cross-linguistic projection of a multilingual consensus of these fine-grained morphological features, both within and across language families. We find high cross-linguistic agreement for a diverse range of semantic dimensions expressed by inflectional morphology.

Keywords

  • Inflectional morphology
  • Linguistic typology
  • Universal schema
  • Cross-linguistic projection

The first two authors contributed equally to this paper.

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Fig. 1.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The local case morphemes can be organized within each category through the use of abstract features that are more general than the feature labels employed in the schema.

  2. 2.

    http://paralleltext.info/data/all/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.wiktionary.org.

  4. 4.

    Some disagreement in the data will be due to errors in our Wiktionary data, or the automated Bible alignment. We do not discuss these sources of noise in this paper, but they should affect all measurements in a uniform way, and thus do not preclude the comparisons we make.

  5. 5.

    When comparing Albanian and Latin pivots to the consensus of their translations, no Albanian and Latin translations were used. Using only cross-language consensus prevents unfair advantage from self-similarity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA

    John Sylak-Glassman & Christo Kirov

  2. Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA

    Matt Post

  3. Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA

    Matt Post, Roger Que & David Yarowsky

Authors
  1. John Sylak-Glassman
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  2. Christo Kirov
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  3. Matt Post
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  4. Roger Que
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  5. David Yarowsky
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Correspondence to John Sylak-Glassman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Germany

    Cerstin Mahlow

  2. Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz, Germany

    Michael Piotrowski

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Sylak-Glassman, J., Kirov, C., Post, M., Que, R., Yarowsky, D. (2015). A Universal Feature Schema for Rich Morphological Annotation and Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Part-of-Speech Tagging. In: Mahlow, C., Piotrowski, M. (eds) Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology. SFCM 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 537. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23980-4_5

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