Error analysis and the role of morphology

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We evaluate two common conjectures in error analysis of NLP models: (i) Morphology is predictive of errors; and (ii) the importance of morphology increases with the morphological complexity of a language. We show across four different tasks and up to 57 languages that of these conjectures, somewhat surprisingly, only (i) is true. Using morphological features does improve error prediction across tasks; however, this effect is less pronounced with morphologically complex languages. We speculate this is because morphology is more discriminative in morphologically simple languages. Across all four tasks, case and gender are the morphological features most predictive of error.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEACL 2021 - 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2021
Pages1887-1900
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085022
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Associationfor Computational Linguistics, EACL 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 19 Apr 202123 Apr 2021

Conference

Conference16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Associationfor Computational Linguistics, EACL 2021
ByVirtual, Online
Periode19/04/202123/04/2021
SponsorBabelscape, Bloomberg Engineering, Facebook AI, Grammarly, LegalForce

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics

ID: 283136052