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arXiv · 2012.06262

Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysis

Hyunji Hayley Park·Katherine J. Zhang·Coleman Haley·Kenneth Steimel·Han Liu·Lane Schwartz
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Abstract

Prior studies in multilingual language modeling (e.g., Cotterell et al., 2018; Mielke et al., 2019) disagree on whether or not inflectional morphology makes languages harder to model. We attempt to resolve the disagreement and extend those studies. We compile a larger corpus of 145 Bible translations in 92 languages and a larger number of typological features. We fill in missing typological data for several languages and consider corpus-based measures of morphological complexity in addition to expert-produced typological features. We find that several morphological measures are significantly associated with higher surprisal when LSTM models are trained with BPE-segmented data. We also investigate linguistically-motivated subword segmentation strategies like Morfessor and Finite-State Transducers (FSTs) and find that these segmentation strategies yield better performance and reduce the impact of a language's morphology on language modeling.

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Hyunji Hayley Park, Katherine J. Zhang, Coleman Haley, Kenneth Steimel, Han Liu, Lane Schwartz. 2020-12-11. Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00365

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