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Probabilistic Modelling of Morphologically Rich Languages

by Jan A. Botha

1 cards · Thesis

PhD thesis — University of Oxford, 2015. Full text: https://archive.org/details/arxiv-1508.04271

Card #c1434SynthesisThesis

Probabilistic Modelling of Morphologically Rich Languages

Treating words as opaque symbols is the wrong assumption for morphologically complex languages. Encoding morphology into three model types — a Bayesian compound-decomposition n-gram model, a distributed model learning vector representations of morphemes, and an unsupervised model that discovers even discontiguous (Semitic-style) morphemes — improves model performance and beats the data sparsity that morphological processes create, with benefits for machine translation.

— In our words · Source: Probabilistic Modelling of Morphologically Rich Languages (Jan A. Botha)

[Use when]

Don't model the surface — learn the substructure; the regularities that fix sparsity live inside the unit everyone treats as atomic.

[Why it matters]

A 2015 Oxford thesis that prefigures the subword-tokenization era (BPE, SentencePiece) — it argued a decade early that models must learn word-internal structure to handle morphologically rich languages.

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