Linguistics 8350: Seminar in Morphology
Linguistics 8800: Seminar in Computational Linguistics
Topic: Models of Morphological Learning and Change
Instructor: Prof. Micha Elsner Instructor: Prof. Andrea Sims
Office: 222E Oxley Hall Office: 314 Oxley Hall
Mailbox: 121 Oxley Hall Mailbox: 121 Oxley Hall
Email: elsner.14@osu.edu Email: sims.120@osu.edu
Office hours: Mo 10-11a, Th 4-5p Office hours: Tu 9a-12n
and by appointment and by appointment
Class time: WeFr 11:10a – 12:30p
Class location: 103 Oxley Hall
Course Information
Description: Where do languages come from, and how do they evolve? We learn the languages we speak as infants or students; as adults, we transmit them to new generations of speakers. In a variety of linguistic sub-areas, researchers have claimed that this process of iterated language learning influences the kinds of languages which exist in the world (language typology) and the process of language change over time. Many of these researchers have proposed computational models of this process, enabling the rapid simulation of “learners” exposed to different language inputs, and of many generations of “teaching” and “learning”.
This seminar will investigate the learning process, with special reference to the case of inflectional morphology (grammatical forms of a word, such as singular cat ~ plural cats). We will bring together research in several areas of linguistics in order to discover how the different perspectives taken across sub-communities combine (or fail to combine!) to address the problem. The reading list will cover:
- Typology of inflectional systems: what sort of languages are out there
- Learning-based theories of morphological typology and change
- Cognitive models of morphological learning
- Engineering models of inflection prediction
- Computational work on iterated language learning
Goals: By the end of the course, students will:
- Be able to define and use basic concepts in inflectional morphology, statistics and machine learning
- Be familiar with theoretical debates in morphological typology
- Gain experience in reading and critiquing academic papers
- Learn how to propose, refine and carry out a small linguistic research project
Course Credit: This course is a little unusual, in that it is formally two courses being taught in tandem. You should register for one section only (either Ling 8350 or Ling 8800). Both are available for variable credit (1 or 3 credits). The requirements are the same for each.
All students are expected to do assigned readings, contribute to the discussion board, participate in class discussions, and lead class discussion. Students taking the seminar for 3 credits will lead class discussions more often and are also required to conduct a term project related to morphological learning/typology/change.
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in a linguistics program (in any department), or instructor permission. Since this is a seminar, students are expected to have some background in computational linguistics or morphological theory or typology, but not necessarily more than one of these. The goal is to make the material accessible to everyone at a general level, while allowing students to pursue advanced competence in their area(s) of specialized knowledge.
Required Texts: All assigned readings are available from Carmen. The Carmen sites for the course are merged (you will access the Ling 8800 site regardless of which section of the course you are taking). Carmen will also have lists of supplementary readings and of resources which may be useful for your research.
Course Requirements
In-Class Participation: You are expected to come to class on a daily basis, having done any assigned reading and ready to discuss. You are expected to contribute substantively and productively to the class discussions. If you have to miss a class, please let the instructors know ahead of time.
Reading: Readings are due on the dates listed on the attached Course Schedule (subject to announced changes). You may find that you need to do some readings twice in order to sufficiently digest the material. Set aside enough time to do that. Please also bring a copy of the day’s assigned reading to class with you (paper or electronic).
Discussion Board Participation: There is a Carmen discussion board for each reading. You are expected to post a comment or question related to the reading by 10pm the day before the relevant class. (This gives the discussion leader time to review the comments and prepare.) Your participation can take the form of a new discussion question/comment, or response to an existing question/comment. Your goal should be to identify important and interesting issues for in-class discussion (including, potentially, things you find confusing). You are encouraged to ask purely comprehension questions on the discussion boards as well, but this should be in addition to a question/comment that is discussion-oriented.
Leading Class Discussion: Starting in week 2, in-class discussions of papers will be led by students on a rotating basis. All students, regardless of how many credits they are taking the course for, will lead class discussion on one day. (You are responsible for all papers assigned on a given day; sometimes there is more than one.) When it is your turn as discussion leader, you should prepare questions/issues for discussion. These should be drawn from the Carmen discussion board. You may also add your own ideas. At the beginning of class discussion, you should give a succinct (appx. 3-minute) oral summary of the paper, and then guide discussion by the entire class. While you are not expected to understand every detail of the paper(s), you should have a firm grip on the basic argument and enough understanding of the details to be able to lead a productive discussion. Since some papers are challenging, you are encouraged to begin preparing well in advance. You may find it helpful to prepare slides, or a handout of questions and issues for the class.
In the three weeks before Thanksgiving, students will select the assigned readings, within the scope of the course topic. These readings will be selected and presented by the project groups (that is, students taking the course for 3 credits). You can select a reading based on your interests (e.g. a reading related to your term project topic) and/or the class material (e.g. a reading that extends a topic from earlier in the semester, or is related to a question raised earlier in the semester).
Term Project: If you are enrolled for 3 credits, you will develop a term project related to morphological learning/typology/change. You will work on the project in groups. Ideally, you will produce a complete project by the end of the semester, but for a larger-scope project a well-developed proposal or pilot project may be appropriate. We will discuss expectations in class, but you are encouraged to come talk to us about possible project topics early in the semester. Groups will present their projects to the class near the end of the semester. See the Course Schedule for deadlines related to the term project.
Resources to help with project development (e.g. links to data sets) are available on Carmen.
Grading
Grading will be by the following criteria.
Taking for one credit Taking for three credits
Class Participation 35% Class Participation 25%
Discussion Board 35% Discussion Board 25%
Leading Class Discussion 30% Leading Class Discussion 20%
___________________________ Term Project 30%
Total 100% ______________________________________
Total 100%
Grading Scale:
A 93-100 B+ 87-89 C+ 77-79 D+ 67-69
A- 90-92 B 83-86 C 73-76 D 60-66
B- 80-82 C- 70-72 E 0-59
Important Policies
Academic Integrity: It is the responsibility of the Committee on Academic Misconduct to investigate or establish procedures for the investigation of all reported cases of student academic misconduct. The term “academic misconduct” includes forms of student academic misconduct wherever committed; illustrated by, but not limited to, cases of plagiarism and dishonest practices in connection with examinations. Instructors shall report all instances of alleged academic misconduct to the committee (Faculty Rule 3335-5-487). For additional information, see the Code of Student Conduct (hppt://studentaffairs.osu.edu/info_for_students/csc.asp).
Students with Special Needs: Students with disabilities that have been certified by the Office for Disability Services will be appropriately accommodated, and should inform the instructor as soon as possible of their needs. The Office for Disability Services is located in 098 Baker Hall, 113 W. 12th Ave.; telephone 292-3307, TDD 292-0901; http://www.ods.ohio-state.edu (Links to an external site.).
Diversity As a Core Value: The Ohio State University affirms the importance and value of diversity in the student body. Our programs and curricula reflect our multicultural society and global economy and seek to provide opportunities for students to learn more about persons who are different from them. We are committed to maintaining a community that recognizes and values the inherent worth and dignity of every person; fosters sensitivity, understanding, and mutual respect among each member of our community; and encourages each individual to strive to reach his or her own potential. Discrimination against any individual based upon protected status, which is defined as age, color, disability, gender identity or expression, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status, is prohibited.
Information about Counseling and Consultation Services: As a student you may experience a range of issues that can cause barriers to learning, such as strained relationships, increased anxiety, alcohol/drug problems, feeling down, difficulty concentrating and/or lack of motivation. These mental health concerns or stressful events may lead to diminished academic performance or reduce your ability to participate in daily activities. The Ohio State University offers services to assist you with addressing these and other concerns you may be experiencing. If you or someone you know are suffering from any of these conditions, you can learn more about the broad range of confidential mental health services available on campus via the Office of Student Life Counseling and Consultation Services (CCS) by visiting ccs.osu.edu (Links to an external site.) or calling (614) 292- 5766. CCS is located on the 4th Floor of the Younkin Success Center and 10th Floor of Lincoln Tower. You can reach an on-call counselor when CCS is closed at (614) 292-5766 and 24-hour emergency help is also available through the 24/7 National Prevention Hotline at 1-(800)-273-TALK or at suicidepreventionlifeline.org (Links to an external site.).
Food and Drink: You may bring food and drink to class, to the extent that it is allowed in our classroom. But please do not bring anything that will be disruptive to the class.
Course Schedule
The following schedule is a plan but not set in stone. We will try to give one week’s notice of any deviations. We will try to maintain a current version of the course schedule on Carmen. When more than one reading is assigned for a day, do them in the order listed. The readings are available on Carmen.
* = student-led presentation of paper
| Date | Topics | Readings | Discussion Leader |
| Wed 8/22 | Course basics & goals | ||
| Fri 8/24 | Intro to inflectional morphology: Questions, goals, and philosophies | Comrie (1981, §2.3) – optional background Plank (1991) – skim §1; read §2&3; §4 is optional Stump (2001, §1.1-1.3) Blevins (2016, §7-7.1) |
Andrea |
| Wed 8/29 | Morphological learning, change, and typology: More questions and goals | MacWhinney (2010) – optional background Harris (2008)* – if short on time, you can skip §3.4 Rácz et al. (2015)* |
Martha |
| Fri 8/31 | Intro to information theory, and its application to inflection class systems | Manning and Schütze Ch. 2 – optional background Ackerman et al. (2009)* |
Nathan |
| Wed 9/5 | Intro to computational learning models | Goldsmith (2001)* | Evan |
| Fri 9/7 | Reinflection | Albright (2002)* | Michelle |
| Wed 9/12 | Intro to neural nets; Reinflection |
Thomas (2017) – optional background Faruqui et al. (2016) |
Micha |
| Fri 9/14 | Reinflection | Kann and Schütze (2016)* Kann et al. (2017)* |
David and Alex |
| Wed 9/19 | Reinflection | Narasimhan et al. (2015)* | Byung-Doh |
| Fri 9/21 | Constraints on the complexity of inflection class systems | Carstairs-McCarthy (1994)* | Luana |
| Wed 9/26 | Constraints on the complexity of inflection class systems | Ackerman and Malouf (2013)* Stump and Finkel (2015)* |
Shuan |
| Fri 9/28 | Constraints on the complexity of inflection class systems | Cotterell et al. (to appear 2019)* | Kendra |
| Wed 10/3 | Constraints on the complexity of inflection class systems | Pirrelli et al. (2015)* | Stephanie |
| Fri 10/5 | Learning biases and language typology | Dale and Lupyan (2011)* Meinhardt et al. (to appear 2019)* |
Antonio |
| Wed 10/10 | Intro to iterated learning models; Learning and the emergence of inflectional irregularity |
Kirby and Hurford (2002)* Group project topics due |
Cory |
| Fri 10/12 | No class – Autumn Break | ||
| Wed 10/17 | Learning and the emergence of inflectional irregularity | Blevins et al. (2017)*
Groups choose readings + short description of how reading fits with your project (what you want to focus on in discussion) |
Noah |
| Fri 10/19 | Learning and the emergence of inflectional irregularity | Cotterell et al. (in prep)* | Lifeng |
| Wed 10/24 | Learning and the emergence of inflectional irregularity | Parker et al. (to appear 2019)* | Symon |
| Fri 10/26 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Castelló et al (2013)* | Byung-Doh, Evan |
| Wed 10/31 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Caballero and Kapatsinksi et al (in prep)* | Martha, Stephanie |
| Fri 11/2 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Rosemeyer (2015)* | Kendra, David |
| Wed 11/7 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Cotterell et al. (2015)* | Martha, Stephanie |
| Fri 11/9 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Winford (2018)* | Luana, Cory, Alex |
| Wed 11/14 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Reali and Griffiths (2009)* | Byung-Doh, Evan, Kendra, David |
| Fri 11/16 | Student-chosen readings (project groups) | Legate and Yang (2007)* | Alex, Cory, Luana |
| Wed 11/21 | No class – Thanksgiving Break | ||
| Fri 11/23 | No class – Thanksgiving Break | ||
| Wed 11/28 | Wrap-up | ||
| Fri 11/30 | Term project presentations | Kendra and David
Evan and Byung-Doh |
|
| Wed 12/5 | Term project presentations | Luana, Cory, and Alex
Martha and Stephanie |
|
| Th 12/13noon | Term project write-ups due(no class) |
References
Ackerman, Farrell, James P. Blevins, and Robert Malouf. 2009. “Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms.” In Analogy in grammar: Form and acquisition, edited by James P. Blevins and Juliette Blevins, 54-82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ackerman, Farrell, and Robert Malouf. 2013. “Morphological organization: The Low Conditional Entropy Conjecture.” Language 89 (3):429-464.
Albright, Adam. 2002. “Islands of reliability for regular morphology: Evidence from Italian.” Language 78(4): 684-709.
Blevins, James P. 2016. Word and paradigm morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blevins, James P., Petar Milin, and Michael Ramscar. 2017. “The Zipfian Paradigm Cell Filling Problem.” In Perspectives on morphological structure: Data and analysis, edited by Ferenc Kiefer, James P. Blevins and Huba Bartos. Leiden: Brill.
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1994. “Inflection classes, gender and the principle of contrast.” Language 70(4):737-788.
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language universals and linguistic typology: Syntax and morphology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cotterell, Ryan, Christo Kirov, Mans Hulden, and Jason Eisner. in prep. “On the diachronic stability of irregularity in inflectional morphology.”
—. to appear 2019. “On the complexity and typology of inflectional morphological systems.” Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Dale, Rick, and Gary Lupyan. 2011. “Understanding the origins of morphological diversity: The Linguistic Niche Hypothesis.” Advances in Complex Systems 15(3/4):1150017-1-16.
Faruqui, Manaal, Yulia Tsvetkov, Graham Neubig, and Chris Dyer. 2016. “Morphological inflection generation using character sequence to sequence learning.” In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computatioanal Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2016), 634-643. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Goldsmith, John. 2001. “Unsupervised learning of the morphology of a natural language.” Computational Linguistics no. 27 (2):153-198.
Harris, Alice. 2008. “On the explanation of typologically unusual structures.” In Linguistic universals and language change, edited by Jeff Good, 54-76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kann, Katharina, Ryan Cotterell, and Hinrich Schütze. 2017. “Neural multi-source morphological reinflection.” In Proceedings of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2017, 514-524. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kann, Katharina, and Hinrich Schütze. 2016. “MED: The LMU system for the SIGMORPHON 2016 shared task on morphological reinflection.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, 62-70. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kirby, Simon and James R. Hurford. 2002. “The emergence of linguistic structure: An overview of the iterated learning model.” In Simulating the evolution of language, edited by Angelo Cangelosi and Dominico Parisi, 121-147. London: Springer.
MacWhinney, Brian. 2010. “A tale of two paradigms.” In Language acquisition across linguistic and cognitive systems, edited by Michèle Kail and Maya Hickmann, 17-32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Manning, Christopher and Hinrich Schütze. 1999. “Foundations of statistical natural language processing.” Cambridge: MIT Press.
Meinhardt, Eric, Robert Malouf, and Farrell Ackerman. to appear 2019. “Morphology gets more complex, unless it doesn’t.” In Morphological Typology and Linguistic Cognition, edited by Andrea D. Sims, Adam Ussishkin, Jeff Parker and Samantha Wray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Narasimhan, Karthik, Regina Barzilay, and Tommi Jaakkola. 2015. “An unsupervised method for uncovering morphological chains.” Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 3.
Parker, Jeff, Robert Reynolds, and Andrea D. Sims. to appear 2019. “The role of language-specific network properties in the emergence of inflectional irregularity.” In Morphological Typology and Linguistic Cognition, edited by Andrea D. Sims, Adam Ussishkin, Jeff Parker and Samantha Wray.
Pirrelli, Vito, Marcello Ferro, and Claudia Marzi. 2015. “Computational complexity of abstractive morphology.” In Understanding and measuring morphological complexity, edited by Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown and Greville G. Corbett, 141-166. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plank, Frans. 1991. “Of abundance and scantiness in inflection: A typological prelude.” In Paradigms: The economy of inflection, edited by Frans Plank, 1-39. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rácz, Péter, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Jennifer B. Hay, and Viktória Papp. 2015. “Morphological emergence.” In The handbook of language emergence, edited by Brian MacWhinney and William O’Grady, 123-146. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons.
Reali, Florencia and Thomas L. Griffiths. 2009. The evolution of frequency distributions: Relating regularization to inductive biases through iterated learning. Cognition 111(3): 317-328.
Smith, Kenny. 2016. “Iterated learning in populations of Bayesian agents.” In Proceedings of the Thirty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, edited by Niels Taatgen and Hedderik van Rijn, 697-702. Cognitive Science Society.
Stump, Gregory. 2001. Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stump, Gregory, and Raphael Finkel. 2015. “The complexity of inflectional systems.” Linguistics Vanguard no. 1 (1):101-118.
Thomas, Andy. 2017. “Neural Networks Tutorial – A Pathway to Deep Learning”. http://adventuresinmachinelearning.com/neural-networks-tutorial/ (Links to an external site.) Accessed 27 July 2018.
Student-chosen papers
Caballero, Gabriela and Kapatsinski, Vsevolod. (2018). How agglutinative? Searching for cues to meaning in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) using discriminative learning. In preparation.
Castelló, X., Loureiro-Porto, L., & San Miguel, M. (2013). Agent-based models of language competition.
Cotterell, Ryan, Nanyun Peng, and Jason Eisner. (2015). Modeling word forms using latent underlying morphs and phonology. Transactions of the ACL 3: 433-447.
Legate, Julie Anne, and Charles Yang. “Morphosyntactic learning and the development of tense.” Language Acquisition 14.3 (2007): 315-344.
Rosemeyer, M. (2015). How usage rescues the system: Persistence as conservation. Variation in language: System-and usage-based approaches, 289-311.
Winford, Donald (2018). Creole tense-mood-aspect systems. Annual Review of Linguistics 4:193–212.