Inflected Forms Research Articles

Developing an Urdu Lemmatizer Using a Dictionary-Based Lookup Approach

Lemmatization aims at returning the root form of a word. The lemmatizer is envisioned as a vital instrument that can assist in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. These tasks include Information Retrieval, Word Sense Disambiguation, Machine Translation, Text Reuse, and Plagiarism Detection. Previous studies in the literature have focused on developing lemmatizers using rule-based approaches for English and other highly-resourced languages. However, there have been no thorough efforts for the development of a lemmatizer for most South Asian languages, specifically Urdu. Urdu is a morphologically rich language with many inflectional and derivational forms. This makes the development of an efficient Urdu lemmatizer a challenging task. A standardized lemmatizer would contribute towards establishing much-needed methodological resources for this low-resourced language, which are required to boost the performance of many Urdu NLP applications. This paper presents a lemmatization system for the Urdu language, based on a novel dictionary lookup approach. The contributions made through this research are the following: (1) the development of a large benchmark corpus for the Urdu language, (2) the exploration of the relationship between parts of speech tags and the lemmatizer, and (3) the development of standard approaches for an Urdu lemmatizer. Furthermore, we experimented with the impact of Part of Speech (PoS) on our proposed dictionary lookup approach. The empirical results showed that we achieved the best accuracy score of 76.44% through the proposed dictionary lookup approach.

Don’t Cry Over Spilled or Spilt Milk?: Nuanced Semanto-Pragmatic Differences Between -ed and -t in English

Modern English has a small set of verbs that show variability between the inflections -ed and ­-t as preterite and past participle morphemes (Peters et al., 2022; Quirk, 1970). Examples include: burn, spoil, spill, learn, dream, spell, smell, kneel, dwell, leap, and lean (Peters et al., 2022; Quirk, 1970). While -ed is thought to be the more prevalent form in U.S. Englishes, -t is more widespread in U.K. dialects of English (as related to both preterite and perfect forms) (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2023; HarperCollins, 2023). However, in spite of this difference being regularly deemed dialectal (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2023; HarperCollins, 2023), according to some scholars (e.g., Peters et al., 2022; Quirk, 1970), choice between one form or the other may carry semantic consequences. For instance, whereas -ed in participial contexts may be understood as representing imperfective actions, -t might be associated with perfectivity (Quirk, 1970). With this in mind, the present paper had as its objective to further explore the meaning differences that may come about with the use of either inflection.
 
 In the sections to come, I add to the aforementioned discussion by pointing out that, in adjectival environments, the aspectual differences between the two can be analogized as the PLIANT and INTERRUPTIBLE (-ed) vs. the NON-COMPLIANT and TERMINAL (-t). I explain that, while -ed tends to be interpreted as being tied to modifiable or malleable events, -t is read as signaling those which are fixed or unyielding. The findings to be discussed are significant for several reasons: 1) they shed light on the contexts in which each inflected form may be preferred; 2) very few academic works acknowledge any differences, other than regional preference; and 3) to my knowledge, no previous scholarly article has focused on their uses in exclusively, adjectival environments.

Morphology as an aid in orthographic learning of new words: The influence of inflected and derived forms in spelling acquisition

Prior studies have shown that children are sensitive to the principle of root consistency, whereby root morphemes retain their spelling across related words. The current study used an implicit learning situation to examine, in 56 third grade and 56 fifth grade French-speaking children, whether orthographic learning of new morphologically simple words ending in a silent letter benefited from morphological relatedness with inflected and derived forms. In the morphological condition, the new words (e.g.,clirot with a final silentt) appeared in short stories along with a morphologically related form in which the silent letter of the root was pronounced, justifying the presence of the silent letter in the root word. The morphologically complex form was an inflectional form (e.g.,clirote) for half of the children and was a derived form (e.g.,clirotage) for the other half. In the nonmorphological condition, the new words were not accompanied by morphologically related forms. After children had read the stories, their orthographic learning was assessed by asking the children to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g.,clirot,cliros, cliro). Children chose correct spellings more often in the morphological condition than in the nonmorphological condition for both types of morphology in Grade 5 but only for inflectional morphology in Grade 3. Our findings indicate that, in learning new spellings, French children seem to rely on the root consistency principle earlier for inflectional morphology than for derivational morphology. Possible reasons for this developmental delay in mastering derivational morphology are discussed.

Synonyms as the Semantic Component of Conversion

Conversion is very common in modern English. The main condition for the formation of a new language unit through conversion is the change of the syntactic function of the word, which is observed by the change of meaning. It is sometimes necessary to change the basic syntactic environment that is needed for conversion. A word formed by the conversion takes all the inflectional forms of the part of the language to which it belongs. Conversion, as a means of forming verbs and nouns, has become one of the characteristic features of the English language since the XIII century. The conversion formed as a result of the collapse of the inflectional system at the beginning of the Central Asian period. From 1150, a number of derivative verbs formed by conversion from adjectives appeared, and from the 13th-15th centuries, verbs derived from adverbs and participles appeared. In the Middle English period, until about the 15th century, the formation of verbs from nouns and adjectives significantly decreased due to the emergence of a large number of nouns and verbs borrowed from French. The grammatical homonymy of many English verbs and nouns resulting from the loss of inflection was only one of the prerequisites for the emergence of conversion as a new way of word formation.

Modeling Topics in DFA-Based Lemmatized Gujarati Text

Topic modeling is a machine learning algorithm based on statistics that follows unsupervised machine learning techniques for mapping a high-dimensional corpus to a low-dimensional topical subspace, but it could be better. A topic model's topic is expected to be interpretable as a concept, i.e., correspond to human understanding of a topic occurring in texts. While discovering corpus themes, inference constantly uses vocabulary that impacts topic quality due to its size. Inflectional forms are in the corpus. Since words frequently appear in the same sentence and are likely to have a latent topic, practically all topic models rely on co-occurrence signals between various terms in the corpus. The topics get weaker because of the abundance of distinct tokens in languages with extensive inflectional morphology. Lemmatization is often used to preempt this problem. Gujarati is one of the morphologically rich languages, as a word may have several inflectional forms. This paper proposes a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) based lemmatization technique for the Gujarati language to transform lemmas into their root words. The set of topics is then inferred from this lemmatized corpus of Gujarati text. We employ statistical divergence measurements to identify semantically less coherent (overly general) topics. The result shows that the lemmatized Gujarati corpus learns more interpretable and meaningful subjects than unlemmatized text. Finally, results show that lemmatization curtails the size of vocabulary decreases by 16% and the semantic coherence for all three measurements-Log Conditional Probability, Pointwise Mutual Information, and Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information-from -9.39 to -7.49, -6.79 to -5.18, and -0.23 to -0.17, respectively.

Experimental evidence of the production of inflected infinitives by Brazilian Portuguese speakers

The Minimalist Program launched by N. Chomsky (1995) inspired reductionist accounts of Control phenomena, which tried to eliminate ‘PRO’ from the theory of grammar, treating it as a trace (copy) of movement (Martin 1996; O’Neil 1997; Hornstein 1999 et seq.). Such movement theories of Control are directly challenged by the use of inflected infinitives in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as shown in Modesto (2010). Many supporters of the movement theory, however, have denied the empirical argument, making the claim that inflected infinitives “are not natural in BP” (Rodrigues & Hornstein 2013: 307), not belonging to BP’s “core grammar”. This study, then, presents two experiments in which production of nonfinite inflection is implicitly elicited in a pseudoword oral completion task. Participants from different linguistic geographic varieties (the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) heard the pseudoverb in its gerundive form and were then prompted to insert the pseudoverb in a sentence frame that would be compatible with both uninflected and inflected infinitive forms. Our results show 73.3% of participants inflected the infinitive to some degree when indirectly primed to do so, and that 40.9% did so, even when not primed. Results also show that while linearly distant plural markings (on the subject) did not influence behavior, adjacent morphosyntactic plural markings (on secondary predicates, for instance) did slightly increase the probability of inflection. Both priming effects and sensitivity to morphosyntactic context seem to indicate that nonfinite inflection is a productive, albeit variable, feature of BP speakers’ I-grammar.

MedLexSp – a medical lexicon for Spanish medical natural language processing

BackgroundMedical lexicons enable the natural language processing (NLP) of health texts. Lexicons gather terms and concepts from thesauri and ontologies, and linguistic data for part-of-speech (PoS) tagging, lemmatization or natural language generation. To date, there is no such type of resource for Spanish.Construction and contentThis article describes an unified medical lexicon for Medical Natural Language Processing in Spanish. MedLexSp includes terms and inflected word forms with PoS information and Unified Medical Language System^{circledR } (UMLS) semantic types, groups and Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs). To create it, we used NLP techniques and domain corpora (e.g. MedlinePlus). We also collected terms from the Dictionary of Medical Terms from the Spanish Royal Academy of Medicine, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terminology (MedDRA), the International Classification of Diseases vs. 10, the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Dictionary, the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) and OrphaData. Terms related to COVID-19 were assembled by applying a similarity-based approach with word embeddings trained on a large corpus. MedLexSp includes 100 887 lemmas, 302 543 inflected forms (conjugated verbs, and number/gender variants), and 42 958 UMLS CUIs. We report two use cases of MedLexSp. First, applying the lexicon to pre-annotate a corpus of 1200 texts related to clinical trials. Second, PoS tagging and lemmatizing texts about clinical cases. MedLexSp improved the scores for PoS tagging and lemmatization compared to the default Spacy and Stanza python libraries.ConclusionsThe lexicon is distributed in a delimiter-separated value file; an XML file with the Lexical Markup Framework; a lemmatizer module for the Spacy and Stanza libraries; and complementary Lexical Record (LR) files. The embeddings and code to extract COVID-19 terms, and the Spacy and Stanza lemmatizers enriched with medical terms are provided in a public repository.

The competition-compensation account of developmental language disorder.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection in novel contexts leads the inflection to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved through a compensatory behavior that involves producing a more accessible alternative: in English, the bare form. We formalize this hypothesis within a probabilistic model that trades off context-dependent versus independent processing. Results show an over-reliance on preceding stem contexts when retrieving the inflection in a model that has difficulty with processing novel inflected forms. We further show that following the introduction of a bias to store and retrieve forms with preceding contexts, generalization in the typically developing (TD) models remains more or less stable, while the same bias in the DLD models exaggerates difficulties with generalization. Together, the results suggest that inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes by children with DLD could stem from inferences they make on the basis of data containing fewer novel inflected forms. Our account extends these findings to suggest that problems with detecting a form in novel contexts combined with a bias to rely on familiar contexts when retrieving a form could explain sequential planning difficulties in children withDLD. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Generalization difficulties with inflectional morphemes in children with Developmental Language Disorder arise from these children's limited experience with novel inflected forms. Limited experience with a form in novel contexts could lead to a storage bias where retrieving a form often requires relying on familiar preceding stems. While generalization in typically developing models remains stable across a range of model parameters, certain parameter values in the impaired models exaggerate difficulties with generalization. Children with DLD compensate for these retrieval difficulties through accessibility-driven language production: they produce the most accessible form among the alternatives.

Duga kosa - kratka pamet - englesko-srpske paralele u poslovicama kojima se opisuju žene

Proverbs as a genre of folklore contain traditional values of a given culture and views upheld by its members. They form a repository for linguistic analysis, the foundation of which is the relationship between language, culture and society. The analysis of proverbs can be used as a way to deconstruct traditional views. This research paper attempts to explore intercultural and contrastive paremiology by contrasting proverbs from two different cultures, and by identifying and analysing common cultural models within proverbs in different languages. By contrasting proverbs in English and Serbian, the aim is to examine how women are described in proverbs and what proverbs reveal about the two different cultures, their cultural models and how they relate to the female gender. The corpus consists of English and Serbian proverbs containing the words describing women, namely woman, women, wife or wives in English (Hazlitt, 2007), and žena and all its inflectional forms in Serbian (Marković, 2005). By studying these proverbs, we are able to observe traditional ways of societal expectations of women, how they were seen and evaluated, praised and valued. Also, the research may act as a means of charting and rectifying men's views of women and their place in society.

A New Frontier: AI and Ancient Language Pedagogy

AbstractIn November 2022, ChatGPT 3.5 was released on a public research preview, gaining notoriety for its ability to pull from a vast body of information to create coherent and digestible bodies of text that accurately respond to queries (OpenAI, 2022). It is able to recognise the grammar and vocabulary of ancient languages, translate passages, and compose texts at an alarmingly accurate and rapid rate. For teachers, this AI has had mixed reviews. Some fear its ability to produce well-written work effortlessly, while others are excited by its abilities to push the boundaries of current teaching practices. This paper explores how well ChatGPT explains grammatical concepts, parses inflected forms, and translates Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classical Sanskrit. Overall, ChatGPT is rather good at working with Classical Latin and Sanskrit, but its abilities with Ancient Greek are deeply problematic. Although it is quite flawed at this time, ChatGPT, when used properly, could become a useful a tool for ancient language study. With proper guiding phrases, students could use this AI to practise vocabulary, check their translations, and rephrase grammatical concepts.

Paradigm gaps are associated with weird “distributional semantics” properties

Abstract This study investigates the phenomenon of defectiveness in Russian case and number noun paradigms from the perspective of distributional semantics. We made use of word embeddings, high-dimensional vectors trained from large text corpora, and compared the observed paradigms of nouns that are defective in the genitive plural, as suggested by Zaliznjak (1977), with the observed paradigms for non-defective nouns. When the embeddings of about 20,000 inflected forms were projected onto a two-dimensional space, clusters of case and number within case were found, suggesting global semantic similarity for words with the same inflectional features. Moreover, defective lexemes were characterized by lower semantic transparency, in that inflected forms of the same lexeme are semantically less similar to each other, and their meanings are also more idiosyncratic. Furthermore, compared to non-defective lexemes, inflected forms from defective lexemes are further away from the idealized average case-number meanings, obtained by averaging over the vectors of all inflected forms of the same case-number combination. As a consequence, the semantics of defective forms are predicted less precisely by a simple model of conceptualization that assumes that the meaning of a given Russian inflected form is approximated well by the sum of pertinent embeddings of the lexeme, case, and number within case. We conclude that the relationship between defectiveness and semantics, at least the kind captured by word embeddings, is stronger than has been anticipated previously.

A study of number marking in Izere nouns

This research descriptively examines number marking in Izere nouns, using morpholexical rules as proposed by Lieber (1980). In essence, it describes noun inflections for number from base forms in Izere, with the aid of these rules. Data for the research were collected in Fobur, Jos East Local Government Area of Plateau State, using selected nouns from the Ibadan wordlist of 400 basic items, alongside an adapted list of nouns specifically designed for the research. The selected nouns were collected electronically and then transcribed in a way that identified the inflected noun forms from the base ones. The data were then analyzed qualitatively. Morpholexical rules were also proposed to account for morphological changes in the inflected forms of these nouns. The research findings indicate that affixation, tone pattern change and suppletion are the dominant morphological processes that account for noun inflections for number in Izere.

Saraiki Language Hybrid Stemmer Using Rule-Based and LSTM-Based Sequence-To-Sequence Model Approach

Converting a word to its original form, is called stemming, which is extremely important in the field of Natural language processing (NLP). It’s an integral part of the linguistic pre-processing of every Natural language processing application. Stemming converts inflectional word forms into their root word. Much work has been done for stemming in different national and regional languages like English, French, Arabic, German, Urdu, and Hindi. Many regional languages still need work to build digital resources using Natural language processing. Saraiki is one of the widely spoken regional languages in Pakistan. Almost eighty million people use this language for communication. There are very limited digital resources using the Saraiki language available to support advancement in Natural language processing technologies. The current research aims to propose a hybrid stemmer to stem Saraiki Work. The hybrid stemmer contains two hundred prefix and postfix rules and Long short-term memory based sequence-to-sequence model for converting Saraiki words into the stem. Firstly, Saraiki text * Corresponding Author: mubasher@isp.edu.pk was pre-processed, and a rule set was implemented. Secondly, the Long short-term memory based sequence-to-sequence model was deployed to stem the Saraiki word correctly. In the last step, The Saraiki Stemmer performance was evaluated by accurately finding stem word accuracy using a rule-set and Long short-term memory sequence to sequence model. After experiments, using the rule set correctly, stem word accuracy was 68.53%, while the Long short-term memory based sequence-to-sequence model produced 93.0% accuracy of correctly stem words. This work contributes significantly to the regional linguistic field by introducing stemmer for the Saraiki language.

Predicative and markedness bias in loan adjectives

Previous research on loan word accommodation has shown that English‑origin verbs in Present‑day Dutch and French‑origin verbs in Late Middle English are subject to usage biases. In both language‑contact settings, loan verbs are disproportionally frequent in non‑finite and morphologically unmarked forms as compared to native verbs. The present study demonstrates that accommodation biases are also found in loan adjectives. Concretely, loan adjectives are more prevalent in predicative than in attributive syntactic position as compared to native adjectives (predicative bias), and they are more prevalent in uninflected than in inflected forms (markedness bias). The predicative bias is found to rank stronger than the markedness bias, which is consistent with the findings for verbs. Additionally, biases are more pronounced in the French‑Middle English than in the English‑Dutch contact setting. The findings indicate that direct insertion of loan-words, despite being the cross-linguistically most frequent strategy for loan word integration, is not free of obstacles, possibly due to processing costs specifically associated with loan words.

Automatic Lemmatization of Old English Class III Strong Verbs (L-Y) with ALOEV3

This article presents ALOEV3, a lemmatizer based on Morphological Generation that allows for the type-based automatic lemmatization of Old English Class III strong verbs beginning with the letters L–Y. The lemmatizer operates on the basis of the inflectional, derivational and morpho-phonological alternation rules characteristic of this class. The generated form-types are checked against the two most reputed Old English corpora, namely the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose to validate their attestations and assign the corresponding lemma. Results show that 97 percent of the validated forms are successfully assigned a single lemma. The remaining inflectional forms (38 out of 1,256) show competition between two lemmas, which implies that despite the high level of accuracy of the lemmatizer, contextual, token-based analysis is still needed for disambiguation. However, the research shows that competition only occurs in a limited set of lemma pairs and their derivatives. Although the research focuses on but one strong verb class, it confirms that exploring the avenues of automatic lemmatization will contribute to the field of Old English lexicography by either lemmatizing attested inflectional form types or by highlighting areas for manual revision.

A morphosyntactic and morphosemantic analysis of the Malay fear lexeme

Abstract For Malay, when no contextual clues are given, a lexical form can be confusing because sometimes it can have more than one meaning. We postulated that most confusing meanings can be disambiguated through observing their morphosyntactic and morphosemantic structures. We used corpus data and analyzed the possible features of takut ‘fear’ that can help decide which form of takut in Malay to choose. If a default lexical verb meaning is intended (i.e., the original meaning), the feature [Experiencer-(Stimulus)] is needed and the takut (v) form is used. If a causative meaning is intended, the men-(t)akut-kan form is used. If a passive meaning is intended, there are some possibilities, as the choice could depend on the syntax of the passive form, such as whether the [Experiencer] is a first- or second-person pronoun (e.g., benda itu saya takut-i ‘the thing feared by me’) or other pronouns (e.g., benda itu paling di-takut-i oleh-nya ‘that thing feared most by him/her’) or whether an adversative meaning is intended ([ke- -an] form). We propose that both the morphosyntactic and morphosemantic structures of takut need to be considered to better understand the use of the different meanings of Malay derived and inflected forms.

Variation and change in Swiss German agreement morphology: Spatial, social, and attitudinal effects

AbstractThis paper investigates the occurrence of inflected predicative adjectives, an optional yet distinguishing feature of German dialects spoken in southern Switzerland. We provide an in-depth analysis of the patterns of change of this morphosyntactic marker with a particular focus on extralinguistic factors. Historical records from 1950 were compared to contemporary data collected from 192 speakers across 49 localities in 2020–21. Our results corroborate previous reports indicating a substantial, real-time decline in inflected forms. Logistic mixed-effects modeling suggests that the inflection of predicative adjectives occurs more frequently among speakers who report tight social networks, have a strong local dialect identity, and regularly use one or more Romance languages. These findings support the claim that tight social networks and local dialect identity construction may lead to the preservation of conservative grammatical forms. Additionally, the effect of Romance languages highlights the role of transfer phenomena induced by language contact.

Analyzing Moravian Feelings Using Computational Methods to Ask Questions about Norms and Sentiments in Eighteenth-Century Moravian Lebensläufe

ABSTRACT This article introduces a computational methodology of analysis to enhance and assist in understanding the occurrences of sentiment in a sample eighteenth-century corpus of German and English Moravian memoirs (Lebensläufe). The computational methods used include sentiment tagging and scoring to derive sentiment trendlines, part of speech (POS) tagging with lemmatization (grouping inflected forms together as a single base form), word frequency analysis, semantic tagging in XML-compliant TEI, and “key word” analysis. This analysis using DH (Digital Humanities) methods, sentiment trendlines, and contextual word usage can give a more complete picture of how sentiment is used in Moravian memoirs. The corpus of forty-eight transcribed German and English memoirs from the Moravian Lives transcription desk on the project website (https://moravian.bucknell.edu) is originally from both the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the former Fetter Lane Archive, now kept at Church House Archives in Muswell Hill, London, UK.

The Manifestations of Rhythm and its Indications in the Letters of Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari

This study attempts to investigate the rhythm in Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Fadlallah Al-Umari's letters and reveals the indications of internal and external rhythm and their effects on the texts. Also, it studies the capability of discovering the macro and micro idea of rhythm. Therefore, it was purposed to scrutinize the micro rhythmic structures in the writer's letters which associated to form the macro rhythm that has been represented in acoustic rhythm (rhythm of individual letters) which resulted from the repetition of a letter (sound) in each word structure, or in the structure of words existed in successive sentences, morphological rhythm (rhythm of inflectional forms) represented by the repetition of the same inflectional weight in successive sentences, and rhetorical rhythm in selecting alliteration and assonance with assigning examples from the texts; bearing in mind that the assonance is one of the most noted generators of rhythm. Al-Umari adhered to employ it in all his letters, from the beginning to end for each one. in addition to, prosodic rhythm existed in poem verses of the letters surrounded by sentences have such rhythm as well

Review Essay: The Sicilian World of Gaetano Cipolla

Review Essay: The Sicilian World of Gaetano Cipolla