Not All Irregularity Is Equal: Causally Isolating a Rare Failure Mode in Japanese Morphological Inflection

Abstract

Neural morphological generation systems often achieve high aggregate accuracy on benchmark datasets, yet such performance can conceal systematic errors clustered in rare morphological subclasses. We present an orthography-aware diagnosis of Japanese past-tense verb inflection, treating hiragana not merely as a transcriptional medium but as a representational system that encodes morphophonological structure. Using two character-level Transformer architectures evaluated across five random seeds, we show that although both systems exceed 97% aggregate accuracy, a single structurally specific irregular subtype, verbs whose stems end in /e/ and require gemination before the past-tense suffix and make up fewer than 1% of the data, accounts for a disproportionate 30-43% share of residual errors and contributes roughly 34-48x its prevalence to total errors. We then move from diagnosis to causal isolation: controlled ablation experiments show that removing this subtype alone produces larger accuracy gains than removing all irregular verbs combined. These findings indicate that error concentration in neural morphological learning is not driven by irregularity per se, but by the interaction between extreme low-frequency morphological patterns and specific orthographic processes. We argue that morphological evaluation should incorporate fine-grained subclass analysis, and discuss implications for data-efficient, developmentally plausible language model pretraining.