Morphological Lab
Morphology Lab in NLP Summer School 2007
The morphology lab was motivated for the twin reasons of morphological complexity of Indian languages and lack of resources in many of these languages. The lab aimed at i) exposing the students to the issues in Indian language morphology and providing hands-on experience in building tools for morphology and ii) building some tools for resource poor Indian languages. The lab focused on three resource poor languages (Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi) apart from Hindi, which was included as majority of the participants knew Hindi. Two tools were considered viz. Morphological analyzer and unsupervised learning of morphology and totally the lab had 10 projects in various combinations of these four languages and two tools.
There were about 45 participants for the lab most of them having CS or related background and about 5 linguists. The participants were divided into 10 teams with some linguists helping for more than one team. There were about 8 mentors for the lab, whose responsibility was to advice the students in technical or linguistic issues related to the projects. The lab sessions were conducted daily for about 5 hours in the evening and also during the Sundays apart from the dedicated afternoon sessions on two days clocking about 65 hours in total.
At the end of the 14 days, most of the teams have completed significant amount of the respective projects. For example, in the morph analyzer project most teams have covered both the nouns and verbs POS categories in identifying morphotactics, different paradigms along with specific morphophonemic (sandhi) changes. An evaluation was carried out (for both tools) at the end of the lab and the teams has got accuracy (precision) ranging from 32% to 86%. The teams working on Dravidian languages obtained lesser accuracies, reflecting the complexity of these languages as opposed to Indo-Aryan family.
Overall, the lab seems to have generated serious interest among the students on morphology, which hopefully will result in usable resources in future.
The code, data and reports of the individual teams will be put up for download and will be available for other researchers.
Morphology Lab Organizing Team
MSRI
Additional Material
**
Team Details would be up soon.