This Tuesday, David King will be talking about his ongoing work on morphological reinflection:
In a recent shared task, neural machine translation systems performed well at reinflecting a variety of languages (e.g. German, Hungarian, and Turkish), but not Russian. I will present preliminary attempts to analyze where the top performing neural machine translation model still fails with Russian. Since these shortcomings are primarily related to a word’s semantics and sound change (i.e. phonological alternation) I hope to overcome these challenges using Russian word vectors and an additional character level language model.