Integrated morphological and syntactic disambiguation for Modern Hebrew

Abstract

Current parsing models are not immediately applicable for languages that exhibit strong interaction between morphology and syntax, e.g., Modern Hebrew (MH), Arabic and other Semitic languages. This work represents a first attempt at modeling morphological-syntactic interaction in a generative probabilistic framework to allow for MH parsing. We show that morphological information selected in tandem with syntactic categories is instrumental for parsing Semitic languages. We further show that redundant morphological information helps syntactic disambiguation.

Parsing the SynTagRus treebank of Russian

“…With regard to morphological features this is in line with a number of recent studies showing the importance of morphology for parsing languages with less rigid word order, including work on Spanish (Cowan and Collins, 2005), Hebrew (Tsarfaty, 2006;Tsarfaty and Sima'an, 2007), Turkish , and Swedish (Øvrelid and Nivre, 2007).…”

Word Segmentation of Informal Arabic with Domain Adaptation

“…Segmentation of words, clitics, and affixes is essential for a number of natural language processing (NLP) applications, including machine translation, parsing, and speech recognition (Chang et al, 2008;Tsarfaty, 2006;Kurimo et al, 2006). Segmentation is a common practice in Arabic NLP due to the language's morphological richness.…”

Morphological disambiguation of Hebrew: a case study in classifier combination

“…Several preliminary works have recently explored this direction (Tsarfaty 2006;Cohen and Smith 2007;Goldberg and Tsarfaty 2008;Lee, Naradowsky and Smith 2011); further research is still needed in order to obtain the best possible results. In languages with rich morphology, such as Hebrew, these two tasks are closely related and highly intertwined; a joint solution is likely to improve the accuracy of both tasks.…”