Exploring Linguistic Probes for Morphological Generalization
Jordan Kodner Salam Khalifa Sarah Payne
Modern work on the cross-linguistic computational modeling of morphological
inflection has typically employed language-independent data splitting
algorithms. In this paper, we supplement that approach with language-specific
probes designed to test aspects of morphological generalization. Testing these
probes on three morphologically distinct languages, English, Spanish, and
Swahili, we find evidence that three leading morphological inflection systems
employ distinct generalization strategies over conjugational classes and
feature sets on both orthographic and phonologically transcribed inputs.