Introducing various Semantic Models for Amharic: Experimentation and Evaluation with multiple Tasks and Datasets

The availability of different pre-trained semantic models enabled the quick development of machine learning components for downstream applications. Despite the availability of abundant text data for low resource languages, only a few semantic models are publicly available. Publicly available pre-trained models are usually built as a multilingual version of semantic models that can not fit well for each language due to context variations. In this work, we introduce different semantic models for Amharic. After we experiment with the existing pre-trained semantic models, we trained and fine-tuned nine new different models using a monolingual text corpus. The models are build using word2Vec embeddings, distributional thesaurus (DT), contextual embeddings, and DT embeddings obtained via network embedding algorithms. Moreover, we employ these models for different NLP tasks and investigate their impact. We find that newly trained models perform better than pre-trained multilingual models. Furthermore, models based on contextual embeddings from RoBERTA perform better than the word2Vec models

Low-Resource Unsupervised NMT:Diagnosing the Problem and Providing a Linguistically Motivated Solution

Unsupervised Machine Translation hasbeen advancing our ability to translatewithout parallel data, but state-of-the-artmethods assume an abundance of mono-lingual data. This paper investigates thescenario where monolingual data is lim-ited as well, finding that current unsuper-vised methods suffer in performance un-der this stricter setting. We find that theperformance loss originates from the poorquality of the pretrained monolingual em-beddings, and we propose using linguis-tic information in the embedding train-ing scheme. To support this, we look attwo linguistic features that may help im-prove alignment quality: dependency in-formation and sub-word information. Us-ing dependency-based embeddings resultsin a complementary word representationwhich offers a boost in performance ofaround 1.5 BLEU points compared to stan-dardWORD2VECwhen monolingual datais limited to 1 million sentences per lan-guage. We also find that the inclusion ofsub-word information is crucial to improv-ing the quality of the embedding

Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches

Superseded: Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Second revised and extended edition.

This book is superseded by the third edition, available at http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255. This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 2012   This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25

Superseded: Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Second revised and extended edition.

This book is superseded by the third edition, available at http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255. This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 2012   This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25

Superseded: Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Second revised and extended edition.

This book is superseded by the third edition, available at http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255. This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 2012   This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25

Grammatical theory

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. The book is a translation of the German book Grammatiktheorie, which was published by Stauffenburg in 2010. The following quotes are taken from reviews: With this critical yet fair reflection on various grammatical theories, Müller fills what was a major gap in the literature. Karen Lehmann, Zeitschrift für Rezen­sio­nen zur ger­man­is­tis­chen Sprach­wis­senschaft, 2012 Stefan Müller’s recent introductory textbook, Gram­matik­the­o­rie, is an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey for beginning students of the present state of syntactic theory. Wolfgang Sternefeld und Frank Richter, Zeitschrift für Sprach­wissen­schaft, 2012 This is the kind of work that has been sought after for a while [...] The impartial and objective discussion offered by the author is particularly refreshing. Werner Abraham, Germanistik, 201