Paper

Morpheme combinatorics of compound words through Box Embeddings

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Abstract

In this study I probe the combinatoric properties of Japanese morphemes that participate in compounding. By representing morphemes through box embeddings (Vilnis et al., 2018; Patel et al., 2020; Li et al., 2019), a model learns preferences for one morpheme to combine with another in two-member compounds. These learned preferences are represented by the degree to which the box-hyperrectangles for two morphemes overlap in representational space. After learning, these representations are applied to test how well they encode a speaker’s knowledge of the properties of each morpheme that predict the plausibility of novel compounds in which they could occur.

Keywords: compound words, Box Embeddings, prediction of morpheme combinations, geometric structures

How to Cite:

Rosen, E. R., (2023) “Morpheme combinatorics of compound words through Box Embeddings”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 6(1), 165-174. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/eqdw-xb04