Picking Up Where the Linguist Left Off: Mapping Morphology to Phonology through Learning the Residuals

Salam Khalifa, Abdelrahim Qaddoumi, Ellen Broselow, Owen Rambow

Abstract: Learning morphophonological mappings between the spoken form of a language and its underlying morphological structures is crucial for enriching resources for morphologically rich languages like Arabic. In this work, we focus on Egyptian Arabic as our case study and explore the integration of linguistic knowledge with a neural transformer model. Our approach involves learning to correct the residual errors from hand-crafted rules to predict the spoken form from a given underlying morphological representation. We demonstrate that using a minimal set of rules, we can effectively recover errors even in very low-resource settings.