Question: Could the improvements on morphological tagging lead to substantially better lemmatization?
Evidence: * Equal contribution. Listing order is random.
Lemmatization is a core NLP task that involves a string-to-string transduction from an inflected word form to its citation form, known as the lemma. More concretely, consider the English sentence: The bulls are running in Pamplona. A lemmatizer will seek to map each word to a form you may find in a dictionary—for instance, mapping running to run. This linguistic normalization is important in several downstream NLP applications, especially for highly inflected languages. Lemmatization has previously been shown to improve recall for information retrieval BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , to aid machine translation BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 and is a core part of modern parsing systems BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 .
However, the task is quite nuanced as the proper choice of the lemma is context dependent. For instance, in the sentence A running of the bulls took place in Pamplona, the word running is its own lemma, since, here, running is a noun rather than an inflected verb. Several counter-examples exist to this trend, as discussed in depth in haspelmath2013understanding. Thus, a good lemmatizer must make use of some representation of each word's sentential context. The research question in this work is, then, how do we design a lemmatization model that best extracts the morpho-syntax from the sentential context?
Recent work BIBREF7 has presented a system that directly summarizes the sentential context using a recurrent neural network to decide how to lemmatize. As N18-1126's system currently achieves state-of-the-art results, it must implicitly learn a contextual representation that encodes the necessary morpho-syntax, as such knowledge is requisite for the task. We contend, however, that rather than expecting the network to implicitly learn some notion of morpho-syntax, it is better to explicitly train a joint model to morphologically disambiguate and lemmatize. Indeed, to this end, we introduce a joint model for the introduction of morphology into a neural lemmatizer. A key feature of our model is its simplicity: Our contribution is to show how to stitch existing models together into a joint model, explaining how to train and decode the model. However, despite the model's simplicity, it still achieves a significant improvement over the state of the art on our target task: lemmatization.
Experimentally, our contributions are threefold. First, we show that our joint model achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming (on average) all competing approaches on a 20-language subset of the Universal Dependencies (UD) corpora BIBREF8 . Second, by providing the joint model with gold morphological tags, we demonstrate that we are far from achieving the upper bound on performance—improvements on morphological tagging could lead to substantially better lemmatization. Finally, we provide a detailed error analysis indicating when and why morphological analysis helps lemmatization. We offer two tangible recommendations: one is better off using a joint model (i) for languages with fewer training data available and (ii) languages that have richer morphology.
Our system and pre-trained models on all languages in the latest version of the UD corpora are released at https://sigmorphon.github.io/sharedtasks/2019/task2/.
Second, by providing the joint model with gold morphological tags, we demonstrate that we are far from achieving the upper bound on performance—improvements on morphological tagging could lead to substantially better lemmatization.
Answer: Yes, it could.