Better Character Language Modeling through Morphology (P19-1)

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Challenge: Inflected words benefit more from explicitly modeling morphology than uninflectes . morphological supervision is also used to augment character language models in low-resource languages .
Approach: They add morphological supervision to character language models via multitasking to improve BPC performance across 24 languages even when morphology data and language modeling data are disjointed.
Outcome: The addition improves performance even when morphology data and language modeling data are disjointed.

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What do character-level models learn about morphology? The case of dependency parsing (D18-1)

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Challenge: morphologically rich languages require character-level input models to learn morphology, but some models are poor at disambiguating some words . authors of this study show that character- level models learn a lot from input input . explicit modeling of morphologies is expensive and expensive, authors say .
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Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysis (2021.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing studies on inflectional morphology disagree on whether or not it makes languages harder to model.
Approach: They propose to use a corpus of 145 Bible translations in 92 languages to investigate whether inflectional morphology makes languages harder to model.
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Unlike “Likely”, “Unlike” is Unlikely: BPE-based Segmentation hurts Morphological Derivations in LLMs (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) use subword vocabularies to process and generate text.
Approach: They find that Large Language Models (LLMs) perform poorly at handling some types of affixations because subwords are marked as initial- or intra-word .
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Morphological Inflection with Phonological Features (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Recent advances in morphological tasks can be difficult to solve when little training data is available or when generalizing to previously unseen lemmas.
Approach: They propose two methods to manipulate phonemic data to include phonological features instead of characters.
Outcome: The proposed methods yield comparable results to baseline models, with minor improvements in some languages.
A Morphology-Based Investigation of Positional Encodings (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Contemporary deep learning models handle languages with diverse morphology . morphological complexity of languages is closely linked with positional encodings .
Approach: They propose to use positional encodings to integrate morphological complexity into deep learning models.
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Getting More Data for Low-resource Morphological Inflection: Language Models and Data Augmentation (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Morphological inflection is the process that generates the word form given its lexeme and morphological properties.
Approach: They propose to use language models and data augmentation to improve morphological inflection without annotating more data.
Outcome: The proposed model improves by 1.5% with the langauge model and by 9% with the data augmentation.
Confounding Factors in Relating Model Performance to Morphology (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: morphological differences between languages are unclear, but are often considered unimportant . confounding factors make it hard to compare results and draw conclusions, authors argue .
Approach: They propose to use token bigram metrics to predict difficulty of causal language modeling . they argue that confounding factors are contributing to the conflicting evidence .
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Exploring morphology-aware tokenization: A case study on Spanish language modeling (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a recent study shows that subword tokenization improves performance of neural language models.
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Why do language models perform worse for morphologically complex languages? (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Language models perform differently across languages, a new study suggests . morphological typology may explain some of the performance differences, authors say .
Approach: They propose to test morphological alignment of tokenizers, tokenization quality and disparities in dataset sizes and measurement to test this hypothesis.
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Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Morphological inflection is a popular task in sub-word NLP with practical and cognitive applications.
Approach: They propose new methods to analyze data sets and evaluate their generalization abilities to better reflect likely use-cases.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve generalizability and reliability of results and improve generalization abilities.

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