A Novel Evaluation Method for Morphological Segmentation

Abstract

Unsupervised learning of morphological segmentation of words in a language, based only on a large corpus of words, is a challenging task. Evaluation of the learned segmentations is a challenge in itself, due to the inherent ambiguity of the segmentation task. There is no way to posit unique “correct” segmentation for a set of data in an objective way. Two models may arrive at different ways of segmenting the data, which may nonetheless both be valid. Several evaluation methods have been proposed to date, but they do not insist on consistency of the evaluated model. We introduce a new evaluation methodology, which enforces correctness of segmentation boundaries while also assuring consistency of segmentation decisions across the corpus.

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