June 05, 2006

Learning Morphological Disambiguation Rules for Turkish

Deniz Yuret and Ferhan Türe. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference - North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting (HLT-NAACL 2006)
You can download the paper here, the stand-alone Turkish morphological disambiguator here, and the code used in this paper to train the model here.



Abstract: In this paper, we present a rule based model for morphological disambiguation of Turkish. The rules are generated by a novel decision list learning algorithm using supervised training. Morphological ambiguity (e.g. lives = live+s or life+s) is a challenging problem for agglutinative languages like Turkish where close to half of the words in running text are morphologically ambiguous. Furthermore, it is possible for a word to take an unlimited number of suffixes, therefore the number of possible morphological tags is unlimited. We attempted to cope with these problems by training a separate model for each of the 126 morphological features recognized by the morphological analyzer. The resulting decision lists independently vote on each of the potential parses of a word and the final parse is selected based on our confidence on these votes. The accuracy of our model (96%) is slightly above the best previously reported results which use statistical models. For comparison, when we train a single decision list on full tags instead of using separate models on each feature we get 91% accuracy.


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1 comment:

nicole, if you will. said...

hello! I am currently a linguistics student. I am planning on doing a research project on Turkish. I am glad I found your site.