Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (SANLP), pages 7994,

COLING 2012, Mumbai, December 2012.

Morpheme Segmentation for Kannada Standing on the
Shoulder of Giants
Suma Bhat
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
This paper studies the applicability of a set of state-of-the-art unsupervised morphological
segmentation algorithms for the problem of morpheme boundary detection in Kannada, a
resource-poor language with highly inectional and agglutinative morphology. The choice of
the algorithms for the experiment is based in part on their performance with highly inected
languages such as Finnish and Bengali (complex morphology similar to that of Kannada). When
trained on a corpus of about 990K words, the best performing algorithm had an F-measure
of 73% on a test set. The performance was better on a set of inected nouns than on a set of
inected verbs. Key advantages of the algorithms conducive to efcient morphological analysis
of Kannada were identied. An important by-product of this study is an empirical analysis of
some aspects of vocabulary growth in Kannada based on the word frequency distribution of the
words in the reference corpus.
KEYWORDS: Unsupervised morphological segmentation, Kannada language.
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1 Introduction
With the ongoing quest for developing language processing techniques and tools for under-
resourced languages there is an emerging need to study various aspects of these languages.
Kannada, with nearly 70 million speakers is one of the 40 most spoken languages in the world.
It is one of the scheduled languages of India and the ofcial and administrative language of
the state of Karnataka in South India. Its rich literary heritage has endowed the language
with an immense written resource and efforts are currently underway to bring them to web
scales. However, available computational tools for Kannada are only in their incipient stages.
Simultaneously, there is an ever increasing number of internet users who are creating online
materials in Kannada. As more information becomes available it becomes imperative to develop
language processing tools that help us organize, search and understand information in Kannada.
One such task is that of information retrieval and the time is ripe for developing efcient
information retrieval algorithms for Kannada.
The role of stemming to improve retrieval effectiveness, particularly for highly inected lan-
guages and monolingual retrieval has been well documented in (Larkey and Connell, 2003).
Consequently, with the goal of developing a suitable stemmer for Kannada, the focus of this
study is an exploration of the suitability of current state-of-the-art unsupervised morphological
analyzers (studied for English and Finnish) for the task of morphological segmentation of words
and eventual stemming in Kannada. In this sense, we see Kannada as a dwarf sitting on the
shoulder of giants such as English and Finnish.
More specically, we study the usefulness of a set of unsupervised learning of morphology
(ULM) approaches towards addressing the problemof morpheme boundary analysis for Kannada.
Our empirical study uses two corpora in Kannada and we compare the performance of the
approaches with respect to addressing some of the challenges of Kannada morphology. A
by-product of this study is an analysis of the word frequency distributions for the purpose
of creating stop words in Kannada as also to quantify the productive processes of Kannada
morphology. In this study, we restrict ourselves to studying morpheme segmentation noting the
fact that eventual stemming is not a distant goal once we have reasonably segmented a word
into its constituent morphemes.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present a description in brief of the
morphological analyzers for Kannada proposed thus far. Section 3 deals with an overview of the
unsupervised methods we consider in this study and the challenges in Kannada morphological
analysis. A description of our experiment is found in Section 4 with its subsections describing
the corpora used, the evaluation methods and the results. Section 5 deals with the discussion
of the results and error-analyses of the experiment. In Section 6 we analyze some aspects of
Kannada with reference to its word frequency distribution. We conclude the paper with our
conclusion and remarks in Section 7.
2 Related Prior Work
There is some amount of work done on morphological analysis in Kannada. Vikram and Urs
(Vikram and Urs, 2007) present their prototypical morphological analyzer for Kannada based
on nite state machines. There is a mention of its ability to handle 500 distinct noun and verb
stems of Kannada.
Antony et al (Antony et al., 2010) outline the development of a paradigm-based morphological
analyzer for Kannada verbs with the ability to handle compound verb morphology achieves a
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very competitive accuracy of 96.25% for Kannada verbs.
In (Ramasamy et al., 2011), Ramasamy et al. describe their implementation of a morphological
analyzer and generator for Kannada. It is a rule-based nite state transducer with relevant
morphological feature information of Kannada words and well dened morphophonemic
(sandhi) rules governing word generation.
The morphological analyzer for Kannada described by Shambhavi et al. (Shastri, 2011) is a
rule based approach which stores the possible paradigms for the roots available in a lexicon in
a computationally efcient trie data structure. A given word is analyzed by matching it with the
corresponding paradigm. It also performs a morphophonemic analysis of a word that does not
reside in the lexicon by proceeding with sufx stripping and lexicon look-up iteratively. The
developed system has the capability to can handle up to 3700 root words and around 88000
inected forms.
Murthy (Murthy, 1999) describes a nite-state network based morphological analysis and
generation system, MORPH, for Kannada. In essence, the system segregates the procedural
and declarative processing between its two components, the network component - which has
the capability of handing the analysis, and the process component - which has the capability
of handing the morphophonemic decisions. The analysis proceeds in a series of afx stripping
steps, from the input word to the root which is then checked against its stored lexicon. The
performance of the system is reported to be 60 to 70% on general texts.
However, as of this study, the few attempts towards morphological analysis available in the
literature have only marginal details about the studies, broad mentions about performance and
no form of discussion or error-analysis via insights gained for word classes or methods that
worked (or those that did not work) is available. What is clear from available literature is that
all the above methods have pursued a rule-based and completely supervised approach. There
have been no studies to understand the capabilities/limitations of an unsupervised approach to
morphological segmentation in Kannada nor are other corpus-based analyses about Kannada
available.
Consequently, this study is an attempt to ll the lacuna and has the following two goals - rst,
we explore the applicability of state-of-the-art models for unsupervised learning of morphology
in Kannada. Here our focus is not only to analyze the performance in general but also to
study their behavior handling the morphological complexities in Kannada as pointers in the
direction of leveraging their results. Second, we perform an empirical analysis of one of the
largest publicly available corpora in Kannada. To the extent of our knowledge, this is the rst
study exploring unsupervised techniques for Kannada and consequently, we expect it to drive
future efforts towards developing further tools/algorithms that address the broader problem of
stemming in Kannada.
3 Methods for Unsupervised Morphological Analysis
Being the most researched language in the natural language processing community, several
unsupervised morphological analysis techniques have been implemented and studied for English.
In the recent years, however, with the inclusion of other highly inected European languages
such as Finnish in the language processing to-do list, unsupervised methods are expanding to
analyze morphologies more complex than that of English. For the purpose of our experiment,
we focus our attention on three main approaches where the choice is based in part owing to
their success with highly inected languages such as Finnish and Bengali(complex morphology)
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and popularity in available literature. The methods that we will consider for our study are:
1. Goldsmiths method of unsupervised learning of morphology (Goldsmith, 2001),
2. Morfessor Categories-MAP (Creutz and Lagus, 2007), and,
3. High-Performance, Language-Independent Morphological Segmentation (Dasgupta and
Ng, 2006, 2007).
3.1 Linguistica
Goldsmiths method of unsupervised learning of morphology (popularly known by the name of
the tool, Linguistica
1
that implements this technique) is centered around the idea of minimum
description length (MDL). Very broadly, MDL of the data is a combination of the length of
morphology (in information theoretic terms) and length of compressed data (or compressed
length of the corpus, given by probabilities derived from morphology). The learning heuristic
then proceeds in steps of discovering basic candidate sufxes of the language using weighted
mutual information, using these to nd a set of sufxes, then using MDL to correct errors
generated by heuristics. It starts with a corpus of unannotated text and produces a set of
signatures, a signature being a pattern of afxes (prexes or sufxes) that a stem takes
(Goldsmith, 2001). An example sufx signature in English could be NULL.ed.ing.s, which
combines with the stem mark to create the words mark, marked, marking and marks. In
addition to this, the algorithm gives a list of stems, prexes and sufxes with corresponding
frequency information. This method will henceforth be referred to as Linguistica.
3.2 Morfessor Categories-MAP
Morfessor is an unsupervised method for the segmenting words into morpheme-like units. The
idea behind the Morfessor model is, like Linguistica, to discover as compact a description of
the data as possible. Substrings occurring frequently enough in several different word forms
are proposed as morphs and the words are then represented as a concatenation of morphs. An
optimal balance is sought between compactness of the morph lexicon versus the compactness
of the representation of the corpus. For our study we use the most general of the currently
available morfessor implementations of the generative probabilistic models designed for highly
inecting and compounding languages (Creutz and Lagus, 2007).
In Morfessor Categories, the segmentation of the corpus is modeled using a Hidden Markov
Model (HMM) with transition probabilities between categories and emission probabilities of
morphs from categories. Three categories are used: prex, stem, and sufx and an additional
non-morpheme (or noise) category. Some distributional properties of the morphs in a proposed
segmentation of the corpus are used for determining category-to-morph emission probabilities.
An important improvement in this model (compared to its predecessors) is that the morph
lexicon contains hierarchical entries. That is, a morph can either consist of a string of letters
(as in the previous models) or of two submorphs, which can recursively consist of submorphs.
This in turn supports the agglutinative word structure of complex words. The Morfessor
Categories algorithm has one parameter (the perplexity threshold b) that needs to be set to
an appropriate value for optimal performance. Being a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) model,
an explicit probabilty is calculated for both the lexicon and the representation of the corpus
1
Linguistica is publicly available at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/Linguistica2000/
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conditioned on the lexicon. Current versions of Morfessor attain an F-measure value of about
70% for the languages Turkish, Finnish and English. We will refer to this model by its family
name, Morfessor.
3.3 Language-Independent Morphological Segmentation
The third algorithm we consider here (henceforth referred to as UnDivide from the name of the
program accompanying the publication(Dasgupta and Ng, 2007)
2
) is an extension of Keshava
and Pitlers algorithm (Keshava and Pitler, 2006) on language-independent techniques for
morpheme induction. It is possibly the rst to apply unsupervised learning to morphological
parsing of an Indo-Aryan language (Dasgupta and Ng, 2006). At its core is the step for inducing
morphemes using the heuristics in Keshava and Pitlers algorithm
3
. The induced morpheme list
is then modied via three extensions -
Employing a length-dependent threshold to prune the list of candidate afxes - here the
rationale is that shorter morphemes (of length one or two) are likely to be more erroneous
than their longer counterparts;
Detecting composite sufxes via sufx strength and word-level similarity; and,
Improving root induction via a simple but novel idea of using relative corpus frequency of
the candidates.
The important features of this algorithm are its ability to move beyond one-slot morphology
to handle words with multiple sufxes and the identication of inappropriate morpheme
attachments. It achieves an F-score of 83.29% on Bengali.
The rst two of the algorithms studied here are similar in that they have information theoretic
optimization criteria and the heuristics are guided by probabilistic methods. The last of these
is based on heuristics pertinent to word formations in general. The above algorithms seem
attractive candidates for studying unsupervised morphological segmentation for Kannada owing
to the fact that they have very few or no language dependent parameters and because of their
reasonable performance with Bengali and Finnish (with morphological complexities such as
that of Kannada).
3.4 Challenges to Morphological Analysis in Kannada
Kannada is one of the four major literary languages of the Dravidian family. Kannada is
mainly an agglutinating language of the sufxing type. Nouns are marked for number and
case and verbs are marked, in most cases, for agreement with the subject in number, gender
and person. This makes Kannada a relatively free word order language. Morphologically rich
languages such as Kannada, are characterized by a large number of morphemes in a single
word, where morpheme boundaries are difcult to detect because they are fused together.
In addition, rampant morphophonemic processes (sandhi), productive compounding and
agglutinating morphology of inectional and derivational sufxes (the latter mostly with words
2
Its implementation is available at http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu/ sajib/.
3
The key idea in this paper is to use words that appear as substrings of other words and transitional probabilities
together to detect morpheme boundaries
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of Sanskrit origin naturalized into Kannada) drive the prolic word formation processes of the
language(Sridhar, 1990).
Another challenge at the level of word formations is that Kannada is diglossic - the formal or
the literary variety differs signicantly from the spoken (informal) or the colloquial variety.
For example, the rst person singular form of the verb tinnu (eat) in the non-past tense is
tinnuttEne in the literary variety and tinnuttIni (which gets further simplied to tiMtIni)
in the spoken variety. Here we restrict ourselves to the analysis of the literary variety but it
must be pointed out that informal written materials (including plays, short stories or humorous
articles) can include a lot of spoken forms.
It may be worth noting here that effective language processing techniques for a language like
Kannada cannot a rely on a purely rule-based or a purely stochastic approach, since the former
demands subtle linguistic expertise and elaborate hand coding whereas the latter a large and
diverse corpus. What is needed is an efcient combination of both approaches.
4 Experiments
4.1 Data
For purposes of experimentation, we use two corpora whose sizes are tabulated in Table 1.
1. A collection of stories for children, dinakkoMdu kathe written in Kannada
4
by one of
the leading writers Dr. Anupama Niranjana. This corpus being a collection of childrens
stories, is informal in nature as a result of which, includes a widespread use of informal
constructions. Although our focus in this study is on the formally constructed word forms,
efforts needed to clean the data prevent us from excluding the informal constructions
from the corpus.
2. The set of written documents in Kannada from the EMILLE-CIIL corpus (EMI).The doc-
uments comprise a collection of essays on diverse topics including commerce, leisure,
social sciences and literature.
Corpus name No. of word tokens No. of word types
Story collection (DINA) 96370 24851
EMILLE (EMIL) 997012 210368
Table 1: Data size of Kannada corpora.
Vocabulary creation: We then preprocess each of these data sets (romanized) by tokenizing (we
follow the standard tokenization of counting word tokens as units delimited by spaces) and
removing punctuations and other unwanted character sequences. The remaining words are
then used to create our vocabulary, which consists of 24851 word types for the story collection
and 210368 for the EMILLE set. Unlike morphological analysis for many European languages,
however, we do not take the conventional step of removing proper nouns from our word list,
because we do not have a named entity identier for Kannada.
4
We would like to acknowledge the help of the members of Sriranga Digital Software Technologies - Prof. C. S.
Yogananda and D. Shivashankar, in Srirangapatna, Karnataka, India, who made this corpus available.
84
Test set preparation: To create our test set, we rst get a list of common words in the vocab-
ularies of the two corpora. We then manually removed the proper nouns, informal forms for
verbs hyAge,naMge, words with spelling mistakes and high frequency stop words from the
common word list before performing hand-segmentation of the words. In the absence of a
complete knowledge-based morphological parsing tool and a publicly available hand-tagged
morphological database for Kannada, we had to annotate on a subset of the common word
list for generating our test cases. The test set consists of 53 inected noun forms and 50 verb
forms amounting to a total of 103 words. The verb forms included are those with one of the
several aspectual auxiliaries, e.g. hArihOyitu(also termed as vectors, (Sridhar, 1990)), as well
as those with various tense, aspect and PNG markers. The noun forms are those with the form
noun+case ending, or noun+plural+case.
Gold standard: We obtain the gold standard by segmenting the words in the test set and for the
purpose of this study we are looking for a surface-level segmentation. That is, the segmented
word form must contain exactly the same letters as the original, unsplit word. Thus there may
be multiple surface-level segmentations for a given word. For instance, the inected verb form
ODidaru has three surface segmentations - OD idaru, OD id aru and ODi daru all considered
valid for this study.
4.2 Evaluation of the Chosen Methods
We run the algorithms separately for the two corpora with their default parameters. We then
evaluate the results by comparing the segmentation of the words in the test set with that in the
gold segmentation. The algorithms were run in their default parameter settings since a large
enough gold standard to tune the parameters of the algorithms was unavailable.
The evaluation is based on the placement of morpheme boundaries and follows the guidelines
set by the Morphochallenge competition
5
. We use F-score to evaluate the performance of the
segmentation algorithms on the test set. F-score is the harmonic mean of recall and precision,
which are computed based on the placement of morpheme boundaries as below.
Precision is the number of hits (H) divided by the sum of the number of hits and insertions
(I): Precision = H/(H+I).
Recall is the number of hits divided by the sum of the number of hits and deletions (D):
Recall = H/(H+D).
F-Measure is the harmonic mean of precision and recall: F-Measure = 2H/(2H+I+D).
Here a hit occurs for every correctly placed boundaries between morphemes, an insertion for
every incorrect boundary between morphemes, and a deletion for every missed boundaries
between morphemes - all with respect tot the gold segmentation.
In many cases, it is difcult to come up with one single correct morpheme segmentation.
However, we will use the provided gold standard as the only correct answer. For some words,
there are multiple interpretations in the gold standard. All of them are considered correct, and
the alternative that provides the best alignment against the proposed segmentation is chosen.
5
For details see http://research.ics.aalto./events/morphochallenge2005/evaluation.shtml.
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4.3 Results
Linguistica and UnDivide in their default settings exclude the least frequent words (those seen
only once in the corpus) in their analysis. Consequently, we rst run all the algorithms with
words that occur at least twice in the corpus. The corresponding results are summarized in
Table 2
DINA EMIL
Algorithm P R F P R F
Linguistica 62.64 47.11 53.77 45.63 38.21 41.59
Morfessor-CatMAP 73.63 59.82 66.01 67.86 68.47 68.16
UnDivide 63.75 45.13 52.85 72.348 71.58 71.96
Table 2: Evaluation results (reported in terms of precision (P), recall (R) and F-score (F))
Based on the results, it appears that the UnDivide algorithm by far outperforms the other
algorithms for the large data set (EMILLE), whereas Morfessor is the best performing algorithm
for the small data set.
In order to assess the performance of the segmentation algorithm on specic word categories
(noun/verb), we do the following. We split the test set into two - a set of inected nouns and
another that of inected verbs and evaluate the performance for the 6 data set and algorithm
combinations. As tabulated in Table 3, we observe that for inected nouns, UnDivide emerges
as the best performer for EMIL whereas, Morfessor emerges as the best performer for DINA. In
the case of inected verbs, however, we notice that UnDivide is the best performing algorithm
for both the data sets.
DINA EMIL
Algorithm P R F P R F
Linguistica 67.92 59.02 63.16 40.98 47.17 43.86
Morfessor-CatMAP 93.33 73.68 82.35 80.36 80.36 80.36
UnDivide 64.86 42.11 51.06 79.25 85.71 82.35
Table 3: Evaluation results for inected nouns (reported in terms of precision (P), recall (R)
and F-score (F)).
DINA EMIL
Algorithm P R F P R F
Linguistica 55.26 35.00 42.86 44.00 35.48 39.29
Morfessor-CatMAP 54.35 45.45 49.50 55.36 55.36 55.36
UnDivide 62.79 47.37 54.00 63.41 55.32 59.09
Table 4: Evaluation results for inected verbs (reported in terms of precision (P), recall (R) and
F-score (F)).
Noting that several morphological variants of more frequent stems belong to the set of words
occurring only once, we extend the input data to include them and use all words in the analysis.
The resulting change in performance is shown in Table 5 where we compare the results using
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the trimmed data set (no singletons) with those obtained using the full data set. Here we would
like to mention the fact that Morfessor showed a bigger change in performance compared to
UnDivide
6
the other results are not tabulated. In both instances we notice an increased recall
and hence an increase in the F-measure.
Trimmed Full
Algorithm P R F P R F
Morfessor (EMIL) 67.86 68.47 68.16 67.18 80.00 73.03
Morfessor (DINA) 73.63 59.82 66.01 66.91 82.73 73.98
UnDivide(EMIL) 72.348 71.58 71.96 68.97 73.39 71.11
UnDivide(DINA) 63.75 45.13 52.85 63.75 45.13 52.85
Table 5: Evaluation results including all words in the corpus(reported in terms of precision
(P), recall (R) and F-score (F)) for Morfessor and UnDivide. We notice an improved F-measure
owing to an increase in recall in all the cases except for DINA with UnDivide. Linguistica did
not show any change.
5 Discussion and Error Analysis
5.1 Effect of Data size
With the exception of Linguistica, we notice improved morpheme boundary detection (in
terms of increased F-measure) with increase in data sizes. A plausible explanation is that with
increased data sizes, more morphological variants are available permitting better stochastically
motivated decisions. In the case of Linguistica, however, we noticed that only about 65% of the
input data was analyzed (recall that the training data excludes words occurring only once) and
so data sparsity with inadequate access to morphological variants was an obvious reason for
poor performance.
The improved performance resulting from an increased recall (as seen from Table 5) can be
explained as follows. With access to more inected forms of the same stem, the algorithm
has an improved ability to segment the morphemes. As an example with the segmentation by
Morfessor, consider the form mADuttA which in the trimmed case, was not segmented but in
the full case was segmented as mADutt A. Again, consider the case of janarige which in the
trimmed case was not segmented, but in the full was segmented as jana ri ge. This has the
potential to decrease the number of deletions and in turn cause a corresponding increase in the
number of hits (refer back to Section 4.2 for the meaning of hits and deletions in this context).
5.2 Morpheme Boundary Detection
We will now highlight some observations based on the segmentation output of the algorithms
underscoring some special cases that were handled/not handled by the algorithms.
As shown in Table 6, we notice that Linguistica only separates the nal sufx, which in this
example is the plural ending; Morfessor shows a tendency to overly segment the words.
In another instance, the word lekkaparishOdhakarAgalAraru was not analyzed either by
UnDivide or by Linguistica. Morfessor, however, produced the following segmentation:
6
UnDivide and Linguistica in their default settings ignore singleton word types. It was possible to change two
parameters of UnDivide to accept this change, but such a change was not possible with Linguistica 3.
87
Algorithm jagaLavADatoDagidaru aNNatammaMdiriddaru
Linguistica jagaLavADatoDagida+ru aNNatammaMdiridda+ru
Morfessor-CatMAP jagaLa+vADa+toDagida+ru aNNatammaMdir+idda+ru
UnDivide jagaLa+vADatoDagidaru aNNa+tammaMdiriddaru
Table 6: Sample of detected morpheme boundaries for the three algorithms for two words
jagaLavADatoDagidaru and aNNatammaMdiriddaru.
l ekka/ST M + pari/ST M + shOdha/ST M + ka/SUF + rAga/ST M + lAra/ST M + ru/SUF
Based on the sample and other segmentations, we observe the ability of Morfessor to deal
with the complex morphology of Kannada. In particular, the instance of not splitting the
compound aNNatammandiru (meaning brothers) interesting. However, there are also cases of
over-segmentation as seen in the last example here, where lekkaparishOdhaka, a compound,
has been segmented. It appears that a more data-driven analysis leading to a careful choice of
the perplexity parameter b is necessary to tune the model.
5.3 Algorithm-specic Features
We will now consider some features we observe when analyzing the segmentation output of
each of the algorithms.
5.3.1 Linguistica
A closer examination of Linguistica output reveals that it is particularly weak at segmenting
Kannada compound words and its complex verbal inectional system. Kannada being a highly
inected language with a wide variety of inectional and derivational morphology acting
upon the stems to produce valid words, the single-slot capability of Linguistica is a serious
shortcoming of the model. With word formation processes in Kannada governed by compounds,
phonotactics (sandhi), prexation and serial sufxation (from its agglutinative characteristics),
the one-slot procedure seems rather simplistic to capture the wide spectrum of word formation
processes. Nevertheless, looking at the signatures and the stems taking the signatures, a general
framework of a paradigm can be induced and is likely to be more descriptive with a very large
data set.
5.3.2 UnDivide Algorithm
The algorithm was successfully able to generate the following (character-change) rules
by a single character replacement, addition and deletion at morpheme boundaries as
instantiated below. For the noun stems, guDisalu, hAvu, hUvu, haDagu, kADu, kAlu, mAtu,
nIru, pAlu
1. the stem nal u becomes i before the dative case marker ge;
2. the stem nal u becomes i before the genitive case marker na; and
3. the stem nal u becomes i before the dative case marker niMda
which are incipient rules of noun declension (paradigm generation) for Kannada.
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The list of the top sufxes learned by the algorithm includes: gaLannu, yannu, nnu, vannu,
da, lli, nige, gaLu, nannu, ru, ya, diMda, na, ge, yalli, dalli, koMDu. One can identify these
to be the noun endings.
The algorithm correctly analyzed instances of derivational afxes. As an example, we see
that sufxes shAhi in adhikArashAhi and kAra in itihAsakAra and kUlikAra were identied.
Although the heuristics to detect composite sufxes seems plausible for Kannada with the
successful detection (and segmentation) of composite sufxes kkiruva in pUrvakkiruva
as kke and ruva, a more reasonable analysis should likely take into consideration the
morphophonemic (internal sandhi) rules.
It is also worth pointing out here that despite the claim of the language-independence of
the algorithm, the 16 parameters in the algorithm need tuning for a better capturing the
morphological nuances of the language under consideration.
5.3.3 Morfessor Categories-MAP
Upon closer inspection, we noticed that the algorithm has only generated 37 sufxes,
which seems very small given the size of the data. However, owing to the small test
set, the performance does not reect this shortcoming. In the larger data, the algorithm
generated 196 sufxes.
The algorithm has the capability to identify prexes (with its dedicated category for a
prex, apart from stem and sufx). While it correctly identied the prexes vi in viBinna,
A in AdEsha, saM in saMpUrNa and a in amUrta, it incorrectly segmented ADuvudu as A -
Prex and Duvudu - Stem.
As in the case of the algorithm UnDivide, a few instances of derivational morphology
were successfully analyzed by the algorithm. e.g: The sufx shAhi in adhikArashAhi and
kAra in itihAsakAra and kUlikAra were identied.
Unfortunately owing to the fact that no sufcient segmented data was available to tune the
parameters, we are unable to make further language specic generalizations on the items
mentioned above. Testing the systems on a large collection of words from real world data is the
only way to discover some of the potential problems or interesting segmentation patterns.
6 Analysis of Word Frequency Distributions
We now digress slightly from the unsupervised morphological analysis set up and consider
some aspects of Kannada in the light of analyses derived from its word frequency distribution
obtained from the EMIL corpus considered in the study. In this context we ask the following
questions that we think are important from an IR point of view.
1. We know that in English, one can safely say that the most frequent word in a corpus is
the and will likely not be very far from truth to say that of and and follow the in the
most frequent list of words. Analogously, what words in Kannada are most frequent?
2. We know that Kannada has a richer morphology compared to English. Is it possible to
obtain a quantitative comparison of the relative complexities? For instance, how do their
vocabulary growths compare?
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3. In the realm of IR a stopword list contains nonsignicant words that are removed from
a document or a request before beginning the indexing process. What would a list of
stopwords for Kannada look like?
The answers to these questions will be the material we explore in this section.
First we consider the word frequency distribution for the word types in the EMILLE corpus
(with size about a million word tokens) and obtain the frequency of occurrence of the word
types in the corpus. A snapshot of the frequencies of the top ten and the bottom ten are shown
in the Table 7.
10 most frequent words 10 least frequent words
10993 mattu 1 beMbalavAgirisikoLLabEkiruvudariMda
8007 oMdu 1 vyavasthApakarAgiruvadillavAddariMda
5374 A 1 AdEshisalpaTTavugaLu
4803 athavA 1 sURyacaMdranakSatragaLiruvavarege
4608 eMdu 1 AtaMkagaLannuMTumADuvavaruivarella
4525 mEle 1 prItivAtsalyavuLLavarAgiruttAre
3692 Adare 1 toMdaregIDAgiruvavareMdare
3388 tanna 1 nayanamanOharavAgirabEkallade
3370 hAgU 1 paThyapustakagaLaMthavirabEkeMbudannu
Table 7: The most frequent and least frequent words in the EMILLE corpus for Kannada.
We notice that the high frequency slots are occupied by conjunctions, articles, number words,
postposition and pronouns - words that are right candidates for being included in the stopword
list. The words in the other column, the singleton words, may belong to various categories,
but what is salient among them is their length. While some are results of typographical errors,
others are true words formed from internal sandhi processes or compounding or a combination
of both. These singletons account for nearly 66% of the corpus. Successful morphological
analysis of these words cannot be achieved by paradigm look-up alone since their stems are
outcomes of the productive word-formation processes in Kannada and by their very nature, they
cannot all be found in a lexicon. On the other hand, owing to their sparse occurrence in corpora,
taken by themselves, they are not amenable to be considered in statistical analyses. Processing
them requires a combination of rule-based and stochastic approaches deriving the benets of
linguistic expertise (for rule-based methods) and access to large, diverse and permuted corpora
(for stochastic techniques).
Having obtained a frequency list of the word types we observe that the most frequent word,
mattu, accounts for about 1.3% of all word occurrences, the second most frequent word, oMdu,
accounts for slightly over 1% of all words, followed by the third which accounts for about 0.8%
of all words. Going down the frequency list, we notice that it takes 3458 word types to account
for half the corpus (in terms of word tokens).
Now consider these numbers in the light of the following fact that in the Brown Corpus, the
word the is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word
occurrences (69,970 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipfs Law, the second-place word
of accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,410 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,854).
90
Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus
7
.
Using the two facts, we make the following important observations towards making a guessti-
mate of the size of a stopword list for Kannada.
Comparing the number of word types required to cover 50% of the corpus (3458 types in
Kannada vs. 135 in English) and noting that the corpora are roughly of the same size
(and assuming that the genres are similar), we notice that the number of word types
for Kannada is about 25 times that for English. Thus we need to look farther than the
number of stopwords in English to generate a reasonable list of stop words.
Shifting our attention to the other end of the frequency distribution, we now consider
the growth of vocabulary comparing the proportion of hapax legomena or the number
of words occurring once in the corpus. Baayen ((Baayen, 2001), pp. 49-50) shows how
the growth rate of the vocabulary (the rate at which the vocabulary size increases as
sample size increases), can be estimated as, the ratio of the number of hapax legomena
to the number of tokens. Intuitively, this means that the proportion of hapax legomena
encountered up to the N th token is a reasonable estimate of how likely it is that word
N + 1 will be a hapax legomenon, i.e., a word that we have not seen before and one that
will consequently increase vocabulary size.
For the Brown corpus, the number of hapax legomena is 24375 and given its corpus size
to be 1015945, we have an estimate of vocabulary growth rate for the Brown corpus is
24375/1015945 = 0.024. Now consider a similarly diverse corpus, EMIL with the number
of hapax legomena = 140353 and a corpus size = 997012. An estimate of the vocabulary
growth rate for EMILLE(Kannada) is then 140353/997012 = 0.14. Discounting foreign
words (words with consonant endings are good candidates) totaling to about 4585 words,
the estimate of vocabulary growth rate comes to 0.136. Thus, even at a corpus size of
nearly 1 million, we notice that the growth of vocabulary for Kannada is roughly about 6
times that of English. This could be construed as an approximate quantitative comparison
of the relative complexities in vocabulary between English and Kannada and one could
attribute this difference to the rich and complex morphology of Kannada compared to
English.
7 Conclusion
In this study we have seen that a set of unsupervised methods of morpheme induction perform
morpheme boundary segmentation reasonably well. When trained on a corpus of size of about
990K words, the best performing algorithm (Morfessor) had an F-score of 73%. A key feature
of these methods is that they have no language specic rules - the heuristics are language
independent and probabilistic relying only on the training corpus, but are nonetheless able to
capture some important features of the morphology of Kannada. However, we also saw that for
a reasonable coverage of the productive morphological processes, we would need an approach
that captures the productive process. This is possible by a synergistic approach to morphological
analysis that combines a linguistically grounded, rule-based approach with a stochastic method.
So, where do we go from here? In the comprehensive survey article on unsupervised learning
of morphology (ULM)(Hammarstrm and Borin, 2011), the authors, summarizing the general
7
Source: http://www.edict.biz/textanalyser/wordlists.htm
91
strengths and weaknesses of the methods, state typically word segmentation algorithms
perform on an insufcient level, apparently due to the lack of any notion of morphotactics. On
the other hand, typical morphology learning algorithms have problems because the ingrained
assumptions they make about word structure are generally wrong (i.e., too strict) for Finnish or
for other highly inecting or compounding languages. In short, they cannot handle the possibly
high number of morphemes per word.
Continuing their analysis on whether ULM is of any use, most ULM approaches reported in
the literature are small proof-of-concept experiments, which generally founder on the lack of
evaluation data. The MorphoChallenge series does provide adequate gold-standard evaluation
data for Finnish, English, German, Arabic, and Turkish as well as task-based Information
Retrieval (IR) evaluation data for English, German, and Finnish. It can be seen that ULM
systems are mature enough to enhance IR, but so far, ULM systems are not close to full accuracy
on the gold standard.
So if our immediate goal is stemming for IR in Kannada, there is some hope in the pursuit
of a hybrid (unsupervised and rule-based) stemmer for Kannada utilizing the key ideas of
the algorithms considered in this study. Standing on the shoulder of giants such as English
and Finnish (and possibly Turkish) we should look for models attempted and benet from the
knowledge advances achieved for making progress in the task of morphological segmentation
of words and eventual stemming in Kannada.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the help of the members of Sriranga Digital Software Technologies
- Prof. C. S. Yogananda and D. Shivashankar, who not only made the corpus of a collection of
short stories in Kannada available for this study but also made it computation friendly with the
use of their unicode to ASCII converter.
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