Assisting non-expert speakers of under-resourced languages in assigning stems and inflectional paradigms to new word entries of morphological dictionaries

Abstract

This paper presents a new method with which to assist individuals with no background in linguistics to create monolingual dictionaries such as those used by the morphological analysers of many natural language processing applications. The involvement of non-expert users is especially critical for under-resourced languages which either lack or cannot afford the recruitment of a skilled workforce. Adding a word to a morphological dictionary usually requires identifying its stem along with the inflection paradigm that can be used in order to generate all the word forms of the new entry. Our method works under the assumption that the average speakers of a language can successfully answer the polar question “is x a valid form of the word w to be inserted?”, where x represents tentative alternative (inflected) forms of the new word w. The experiments show that with a small number of polar questions the correct stem and paradigm can be obtained from non-experts with high success rates. We study the impact of different heuristic and probabilistic approaches on the actual number of questions.