Quantifying Synthesis and Fusion and their Impact on Machine Translation

Anonymous

Paper Link: https://openreview.net/forum?id=fnYdYtgZZAf

Paper Type: Long paper (up to eight pages of content + unlimited references and appendices)

Abstract:

Theoretical work in morphological typology offers the possibility of measuring morphological diversity on a continuous scale.
However, literature in Natural Language Processing (NLP) typically labels a whole language with a strict type of morphology, e.g. fusional or agglutinative.
In this work, we propose to reduce the rigidity of such claims, by quantifying morphological typology at the word and segment level.
We consider Payne (2017)'s approach to classify morphology using two indices: synthesis (e.g. analytic to polysynthetic) and fusion (agglutinative to fusional). For computing synthesis, we test unsupervised and supervised morphological segmentation methods for English, German and Turkish, whereas for fusion, we propose a semi-automatic method using Spanish as a case study.
Then, we analyse the relationship between machine translation quality and the degree of synthesis and fusion at word (nouns and verbs for English-Turkish, and verbs in English-Spanish) and segment level (previous language pairs plus English-German in both directions). We complement the word-level analysis with human evaluation, and overall, we observe a consistent impact of both indexes on machine translation quality.

Presentation Mode: This paper will be presented in person in Seattle

Copyright Consent Signature (type Name Or NA If Not Transferrable): Arturo Oncevay

Copyright Consent Name And Address: Arturo Oncevay, University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL