Parsimonious Morpheme Segmentation with an Application to Enriching Word Embeddings

Ahmed El-Kishky, Frank Xu, Aston Zhang, Jiawei Han

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Traditionally, many text-mining tasks treat individual word-tokens as the finest meaningful semantic granularity. However, in many languages and specialized corpora, words are composed by concatenating semantically meaningful subword structures. Word-level analysis cannot leverage the semantic information present in such subword structures. With regard to word embedding techniques, this leads to not only poor embeddings for infrequent words in long-tailed text corpora but also weak capabilities for handling out-of-vocabulary words. In this paper we propose MorphMine for unsupervised morpheme segmentation. MorphMine applies a parsimony criterion to hierarchically segment words into the fewest number of morphemes at each level of the hierarchy. This leads to longer shared morphemes at each level of segmentation. Experiments show that MorphMine segments words in a variety of languages into human-verified morphemes. Additionally, we experimentally demonstrate that utilizing MorphMine morphemes to enrich word embeddings consistently improves embedding quality on a variety of of embedding evaluations and a downstream language modeling task.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019
EditorsChaitanya Baru, Jun Huan, Latifur Khan, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Ronay Ak, Yuanyuan Tian, Roger Barga, Carlo Zaniolo, Kisung Lee, Yanfang Fanny Ye
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages64-73
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728108582
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2019
Event2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: Dec 9 2019Dec 12 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019

Conference

Conference2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period12/9/1912/12/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management

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