A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection

Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Jason Naradowsky, Sebastian J. Mielke, Ryan Cotterell
2018 Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)  
Statistical morphological inflectors are typically trained on fully supervised, type-level data. One remaining open research question is the following: How can we effectively exploit raw, token-level data to improve their performance? To this end, we introduce a novel generative latent-variable model for the semi-supervised learning of inflection generation. To enable posterior inference over the latent variables, we derive an efficient variational inference procedure based on the wake-sleep
more » ... orithm. We experiment on 23 languages, using the Universal Dependencies corpora in a simulated low-resource setting, and find improvements of over 10% absolute accuracy in some cases.
doi:10.18653/v1/p18-1245 dblp:conf/acl/NaradowskyCMW18 fatcat:3iuim5cisncjpdjuhxcxqcq4yi