Unsupervised Learning of the Morphology of a Natural Language

This study reports the results of using minimum description length (MDL) analysis to model unsupervised learning of the morphological segmentation of European languages, using corpora ranging in size from 5,000 words to 500,000 words. We develop a set of heuristics that rapidly develop a probabilistic morphological grammar, and use MDL as our primary tool to determine whether the modifications proposed by the heuristics will be adopted or not. The resulting grammar matches well the analysis that would be developed by a human morphologist. In the final section, we discuss the relationship of this style of MDL grammatical analysis to the notion of evaluation metric in early generative grammar.

• Publication year

  2001

• Venue

  International Conference on Computational Logic

• Publication date

  2001-06-01

• Fields of study

  Linguistics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1162/089120101750300490
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Paper Presented At

  2002cited by this paper
• On Information theory, entropy, and phonology in the 20th century

  2000cited by this paper
• Phonological form, morphological class, and syntactic gender : the noun class systems of Papua New Guinea Arapeshan

  1999cited by this paper
• Speech segmentation and word discovery: a computational perspective.

  1999cited by this paper
• Unsupervised learning of derivational morphology from inflectional lexicons

  1999cited by this paper
• Automatic Collection and Analysis of GermanCompounds

  1998cited by this paper
• Unsupervised Learning of Na Ve Morphology with Genetic Algorithms

  1997cited by this paper
• Unsupervised Learning of Naive Morphology with Genetic Algorithms

  1997cited by this paper
• Induction of Slovene Nominal Paradigms

  1997cited by this paper
• Guessing morphology from terms and corpora

  1997cited by this paper
• Unsupervised language acquisition

  1996cited by this paper
• The discovery of algorithmic probability: A guide for the programming of true creativity

  1995cited by this paper
• Quantitative Morphsegmentierung im Spanischen auf phonologischer Basis

  1995influential reference
• Statistical language learning

  1995cited by this paper
• The linguistic knowledge in a morphological segmentation procedure for German

  1994cited by this paper
• The Identification of Morphemes

  1994cited by this paper
• An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications

  1993cited by this paper
• Finite-state Constraints

  1993cited by this paper
• Dysphagia

  1993cited by this paper
• Ein automatisches Morphsegmentierungsverfahren für deutsche Wortformen

  1991cited by this paper
• Autosegmental and metrical phonology. By JOHN A GOLDSMITH. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. vii, 376

  1991cited by this paper
• Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology

  1990cited by this paper
• Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry

  1989cited by this paper
• A General Computational Model for Word-Form Recognition and Production

  1984cited by this paper
• Einführung in die quantitative phonologie

  1984cited by this paper
• Selection of prefix and postfix word fragments for data compression

  1978cited by this paper
• Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM - algorithm plus discussions on the paper

  1977cited by this paper
• Automated morphosyntactic analysis of medical language

  1976cited by this paper
• The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory

  1975cited by this paper
• Word segmentation by letter successor varieties

  1974cited by this paper
• Morpheme Boundaries within Words: Report on a Computer Test

  1970cited by this paper
• From Phoneme to Morpheme

  1955cited by this paper
• Papers in structural and transformational linguistics

  1951cited by this paper
• Morphology : the descriptive analysis of words

  1947cited by this paper
• OF INFORMATION

  year unknowncited by this paper

• Linguistic Units as Tokens: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation with BabyLM

  2025influential citation
• Hybrid artificial intelligence architectures for automatic text correction in the Kazakh language

  2025cites this paper
• The Philosophy of Linguistics

  2025cites this paper
• Morphological Clustering of Neologisms

  2025cites this paper
• Bridging Minds and Machines: Toward an Integration of AI and Cognitive Science

  2025cites this paper
• Annotating and Inferring Compositional Structures in Numeral Systems Across Languages

  2025cites this paper
• Complexity counts: global and local perspectives on Indo-Aryan numeral systems

  2025cites this paper
• From Smør-re-brød to Subwords: Training LLMs on Danish, One Morpheme at a Time

  2025cites this paper
• Morphological Dependencies in English

  2025cites this paper
• Enhancing NLP for Low-Resource Language by Developing Deep Learning-Powered Morphological Analysis of Dogri: An End-to-End Pipeline from Corpus Construction and Linguistic Annotation to Model Training and Deployment

  2025cites this paper
• Recent advancements in computational morphology : A comprehensive survey

  2024cites this paper
• Machine Learning Methods for Kazakh Morphology: A Comprehensive Overview

  2024cites this paper
• A bidirectional LSTM-based morphological analyzer for Gujarati

  2024cites this paper
• Meaning-Informed Low-Resource Segmentation of Agglutinative Morphology

  2024cites this paper
• More than Just Statistical Recurrence: Human and Machine Unsupervised Learning of Māori Word Segmentation across Morphological Processes

  2024cites this paper
• SUSTEM: An Improved Rule-based Sundanese Stemmer

  2024cites this paper
• Improvement of Morphological Analysis based on Three Layers of Lemmatization

  2024cites this paper
• Computational Construction Grammar

  2024cites this paper
• Quantitative and Computational Approaches to Phonology

  2024cites this paper
• Annotation of texts based on semantic analysis

  2024cites this paper
• Tree-Averaging Algorithms for Ensemble-Based Unsupervised Discontinuous Constituency Parsing

  2024cites this paper
• Quantum-inspired neural network with hierarchical entanglement embedding for matching

  2024cites this paper
• Finding structure in logographic writing with library learning

  2024cites this paper
• Enhancing Lexical Complexity Prediction in Italian through Automatic Morphological Segmentation

  2024cites this paper
• Revisiting and Amending Central Kurdish Data on UniMorph 4.0

  2023cites this paper
• Exploring the Constructicon: Linguistic Analysis of a Computational CxG

  2023cites this paper
• A selective approach to stemming for minimizing the risk of failure in information retrieval systems

  2023cites this paper
• A Systematic Review of Stemmers of Indian and Non-Indian Vernacular Languages

  2023cites this paper
• A big data approach towards sarcasm detection in Russian

  2023cites this paper
• Evaluating syntactic proposals using minimalist grammars and minimum description length

  2023cites this paper
• Diachrony and Diachronica

  2023cites this paper
• PWMStem: A Corpus-Based Suffix Identification and Stripping Algorithm for Multi-lingual Stemming

  2023cites this paper
• Unsupervised morphological segmentation in a language with reduplication

  2022cites this paper
• Automatic Detection of Morphological Processes in the Yorùbá Language

  2022cites this paper
• Computational Modeling

  2022cites this paper
• Morphological Processing of Low-Resource Languages: Where We Are and What’s Next

  2022cites this paper
• A Lightweight Stemmer for Telugu Language

  2022cites this paper
• Joint learning of morphology and syntax with cross-level contextual information flow

  2022cites this paper
• Segmenting Numerical Substitution Ciphers

  2022cites this paper
• Exposure and emergence in usage-based grammar: computational experiments in 35 languages

  2022cites this paper
• CaMEL: Case Marker Extraction without Labels

  2022cites this paper
• Paradigm Clustering with Weighted Edit Distance

  2021cites this paper
• Designing and Development of Stemmer of Dogri Using Unsupervised Learning

  2021cites this paper
• Morphological Processing of Words

  2021cites this paper
• Implementation Approach of Indian Language Gujarati Grammar's Concept “sandhi” using the Concepts of Rule-based NLP

  2021cites this paper
• The Algorithmic Inflection and Morphological Variability of Russian

  2021cites this paper
• To POS Tag or Not to POS Tag: The Impact of POS Tags on Morphological Learning in Low-Resource Settings

  2021cites this paper
• Morphology Model and Segmentation for Old Turkic Language

  2021cites this paper
• Morphological Segmentation for Seneca

  2021cites this paper
• Machine learning methods based on probabilistic decision tree under the multi-valued preference environment

  2021cites this paper
• A Masked Segmental Language Model for Unsupervised Natural Language Segmentation

  2021cites this paper
• Minimal Supervision for Morphological Inflection

  2021cites this paper
• APMorph: finite-state transducer for Amazigh pronominal morphology

  2021cites this paper
• Between words and characters: A Brief History of Open-Vocabulary Modeling and Tokenization in NLP

  2021cites this paper
• Multiple alignments of inflectional paradigms

  2021cites this paper
• Production vs Perception: The Role of Individuality in Usage-Based Grammar Induction

  2021cites this paper
• Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation and Part-of-Speech Tagging for Low-Resource Scenarios

  2021cites this paper
• Improving Semantic Coherence of Gujarati Text Topic Model Using Inflectional Forms Reduction and Single-letter Words Removal

  2021cites this paper
• Unsupervised induction of inflectional families

  2021cites this paper
• The Use of the Relational Concept in the Arabic Morphological Analysis

  2021cites this paper
• Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure

  2021cites this paper
• Approaching explanatory adequacy in phonology using Minimum Description Length

  2021cites this paper
• Morpheme boundary Detection & Grammatical feature Prediction for Gujarati : Dataset & Model

  2021cites this paper
• 30 More than seventy years of probabilistic phonology

  2021cites this paper
• Integrating Automated Segmentation and Glossing into Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics

  2021cites this paper
• Deconstructing syntactic generalizations with minimalist grammars

  2021cites this paper
• Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars with Linguistic Priors

  2021cites this paper
• MorphAGram, Evaluation and Framework for Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation

  2020cites this paper
• Glawinette: a Linguistically Motivated Derivational Description of French Acquired from GLAWI

  2020cites this paper
• Design and Development of Unsupervised Stemmer for Sindhi Language

  2020cites this paper
• Exploring a Choctaw Language Corpus with Word Vectors and Minimum Distance Length

  2020cites this paper
• The Paradigm Discovery Problem

  2020cites this paper
• The IMS–CUBoulder System for the SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task on Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion

  2020cites this paper
• A conditional learnability argument for constraints on underlying representations

  2020cites this paper
• A Comparative Analysis of Three Supervised Learning Algorithms in Stock Selection

  2020cites this paper
• Morphological Segmentation for Low Resource Languages

  2020cites this paper
• Unsupervised acquisition of idiomatic units of symbolic natural language: An n-gram frequency-based approach for the chunking of news articles and tweets

  2020cites this paper
• Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion

  2020cites this paper
• Transfer learning and subword sampling for asymmetric-resource one-to-many neural translation

  2020cites this paper
• Induction of Minimalist Grammars over Morphemes

  2020cites this paper
• Probabilistic Segmentation of Word Forms into Affixes and Word Roots

  2020cites this paper
• 32 History of Phonology: Learnability

  2020cites this paper
• Inflectional networks: Graph-theoretic tools for inflectional typology

  2020cites this paper
• Advances in Computational Linguistics

  2020cites this paper
• The nature of the semantic stimulus: the acquisition of every as a case study

  2020cites this paper
• Acquiring language from speech by learning to remember and predict

  2020cites this paper
• Morphological Networks for Persian and Turkish: What Can Be Induced from Morpheme Segmentation?

  2020cites this paper
• Incorporating word embeddings in unsupervised morphological segmentation

  2020cites this paper
• Developing a lexicon of word families for closely-related languages

  2020cites this paper
• Comparison between the morphological analyzers based on graph and the one based on surface patterns

  2020cites this paper
• Tackling the Low-resource Challenge for Canonical Segmentation

  2020cites this paper
• ParaDis and Démonette - From Theory to Resources for Derivational Paradigms

  2020cites this paper
• LemmaChase: A Lemmatizer

  2020influential citation
• The SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task on Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion

  2020cites this paper
• A comprehensive survey on Indian regional language processing

  2020cites this paper
• Integrating Semantics Into Developmental Models of Morphology Learning

  2020cites this paper
• Modeling Morphological Typology for Unsupervised Learning of Language Morphology

  2020cites this paper
• A Graph-Based Framework for Structured Prediction Tasks in Sanskrit

  2020cites this paper
• Language and thought as control of perception

  2020cites this paper
• Design of Experiments in Computational Linguistics

  2019cites this paper