Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku

William Lane, Steven Bird


Abstract
Kunwinjku is an indigenous Australian language spoken in northern Australia which exhibits agglutinative and polysynthetic properties. Members of the community have expressed interest in co-developing language applications that promote their values and priorities. Modeling the morphology of the Kunwinjku language is an important step towards accomplishing the community’s goals. Finite State Transducers have long been the go-to method for modeling morphologically rich languages, and in this paper we discuss some of the distinct modeling challenges present in the morphosyntax of verbs in Kunwinjku. We show that a fairly straightforward implementation using standard features of the foma toolkit can account for much of the verb structure. Continuing challenges include robustness in the face of variation and unseen vocabulary, as well as how to handle complex reduplicative processes. Our future work will build off the baseline and challenges presented here.
Anthology ID:
U19-1001
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association
Month:
4--6 December
Year:
2019
Address:
Sydney, Australia
Editors:
Meladel Mistica, Massimo Piccardi, Andrew MacKinlay
Venue:
ALTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Australasian Language Technology Association
Note:
Pages:
1–9
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/U19-1001
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
William Lane and Steven Bird. 2019. Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association, pages 1–9, Sydney, Australia. Australasian Language Technology Association.
Cite (Informal):
Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku (Lane & Bird, ALTA 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/U19-1001.pdf