Context-dependent type-level models for unsupervised morpho-syntactic induction

This thesis improves unsupervised methods for part-of-speech (POS) induction and morphological word segmentation by modeling linguistic phenomena previously not used. For both tasks, we realize these linguistic intuitions with Bayesian generative models that first create a latent lexicon before generating unannotated tokens in the input corpus. Our POS induction model explicitly incorporates properties of POS tags at the type-level which is not parameterized by existing token-based approaches. This enables our model to outperform previous approaches on a range of languages that exhibit substantial syntactic variation. In our morphological segmentation model, we exploit the fact that axes are correlated within a word and between adjacent words. We surpass previous unsupervised segmentation systems on the Modern Standard Arabic Treebank data set. Finally, we showcase the utility of our unsupervised segmentation model for machine translation of the Levantine dialectal Arabic for which there is no known segmenter. We demonstrate that our segmenter outperforms supervised and knowledge-based alternatives.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Yoong Keok

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Regina Barzilay.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97759

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/97759