Papers by William Lane
Bootstrapping Techniques for Polysynthetic Morphological Analysis (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Polysynthetic languages have exceptionally large and sparse vocabularies due to the number of morpheme slots and combinations in a word. |
| Approach: | They propose linguistically-informed approaches for bootstrapping a neural morphological analyzer . they use a finite state transducer to train an encoder-decoder model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a polysynthetic language's model by "hallucinating" missing linguistic structure and resampling from a Zipf distribution to simulate a more natural distribution of morphemes. |
Depth-bounding is effective: Improvements and evaluation of unsupervised PCFG induction (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent attempts to improve grammar induction systems by bounding complexity of the model have not been compared against unbounded induction models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Bayesian induction inducer to limit the search space of the model and then sample trees with or without bounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces trees more accurately than or competitively with state-of-the-art constituency grammar induction models. |
Local Word Discovery for Interactive Transcription (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new computational task supports the construction of high quality texts and lexicons for low resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational task which is tuned to the available knowledge and interests in an Indigenous community. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a transcription density gain of 17% in a morphologically complex language . the proposed grammar includes a description of the phonology and morphosyntax . |
Interactive Word Completion for Plains Cree (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a tool that helps users incrementally build complex words is being developed in morphologically complex languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a finite state approach which maps prefixes in a language to completions up to the next morpheme boundary for incremental building of complex words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows portability to a larger, more complete morphological transducer. |
Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | morphologically complex languages have multiple morph slots with large or unbounded sets of fillers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for morphologically-aware text input in Kunwinjku . they modify an existing finite state recognizer to map input morph prefixes to morph completions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is portable to Turkish and shows that it can be used in other languages. |
Unsupervised Learning of PCFGs with Normalizing Flow (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing induction models unable to incorporate semantics and morphology into induction . current models lack a robust model for generating morphologically rich sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a PCFG inducer which uses context embeddings to generalize over rare, morphologically rich forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces grammars with state-of-the-art accuracy on a variety of languages. |