Exploring Linguistic Probes for Morphological Inflection

Jordan Kodner, Salam Khalifa, Sarah Ruth Brogden Payne

Submission Type: Regular Short Paper

Submission Track: Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation

Submission Track 2: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics

Keywords: morphology, inflection, linguistic probes, English, Spanish, Swahili

TL;DR: We apply language-specific probes to evaluate morphological inflection model's abilities and styles of generalization

Abstract: Modern work on the cross-linguistic computational modeling of morphological inflection has typically employed language-independent data splitting algorithms. In this paper, we supplement that approach with language-specific probes designed to test aspects of morphological generalization. Testing these probes on three morphologically distinct languages, English, Spanish, and Swahili, we find evidence that three leading morphological inflection systems employ distinct generalization strategies over conjugational classes and feature sets on both orthographic and phonologically transcribed inputs.

Submission Number: 4648