MorphIRe | Morphologically-informed representations for natural language processing

Summary
The morphological structure of a word plays an important role in determining its function and meaning, yet it is often disregarded by current machine learning models aimed at natural language processing (NLP). State-of-the-art NLP models typically rely on word-level or character-level representations. This arguably works well for English, the dominant language in NLP research, since it is morphologically simple, but poses a challenge for morphologically-rich languages like Basque, Estonian, or Kurdish. As a consequence, the current state of the art is biased against these languages, preventing us from building better NLP technology for them.

The MorphIRe project aims to learn morphologically-informed representations for NLP. It proposes to explore the fine-grained morphological analysis of word forms in order to learn representations that are grounded in morphemes, the smallest grammatical unit of language. Using these representations as input to NLP models is expected to improve their performance particularly for morphologically-rich languages. To this end, MorphIRe will make use of deep learning with neural network architectures both to learn the representations and to apply them to state-of-the-art models for a variety of NLP tasks, such as language modelling and dependency parsing.

The impact of MorphIRe is twofold: 1) Learning input representations that can be used in a variety of models encourages reusability of the results and promises that improvements will carry over to future NLP research. 2) Through improving the state of the art on morphologically-rich languages, speakers of these languages will ultimately benefit from better NLP technology. This way, MorphIRe has the potential for making both a scientific and a societal impact.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/845995
Start date: 01-04-2019
End date: 31-03-2021
Total budget - Public funding: 207 312,00 Euro - 207 312,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

The morphological structure of a word plays an important role in determining its function and meaning, yet it is often disregarded by current machine learning models aimed at natural language processing (NLP). State-of-the-art NLP models typically rely on word-level or character-level representations. This arguably works well for English, the dominant language in NLP research, since it is morphologically simple, but poses a challenge for morphologically-rich languages like Basque, Estonian, or Kurdish. As a consequence, the current state of the art is biased against these languages, preventing us from building better NLP technology for them.

The MorphIRe project aims to learn morphologically-informed representations for NLP. It proposes to explore the fine-grained morphological analysis of word forms in order to learn representations that are grounded in morphemes, the smallest grammatical unit of language. Using these representations as input to NLP models is expected to improve their performance particularly for morphologically-rich languages. To this end, MorphIRe will make use of deep learning with neural network architectures both to learn the representations and to apply them to state-of-the-art models for a variety of NLP tasks, such as language modelling and dependency parsing.

The impact of MorphIRe is twofold: 1) Learning input representations that can be used in a variety of models encourages reusability of the results and promises that improvements will carry over to future NLP research. 2) Through improving the state of the art on morphologically-rich languages, speakers of these languages will ultimately benefit from better NLP technology. This way, MorphIRe has the potential for making both a scientific and a societal impact.

Status

CLOSED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2018

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2018
MSCA-IF-2018