How Do We Learn What We Cannot Say?

Author

Daniel Yakubov, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

Kyle Gorman

Subject Categories

Computational Linguistics

Keywords

defectivity, defectiveness, paradigm gaps, morphological analyzer, BERT, multi-task learning

Abstract

The contributions of this thesis are two-fold. First, this thesis presents UDTube, an easily usable software developed to perform morphological analysis in a multi-task fashion. This work shows the strong performance of UDTube versus the current state-of-the-art, UDPipe, across eight languages, primarily in the annotation of morphological features. The second contribution of this thesis is a exploration into the study of defectivity. UDTube is used to annotate a large amount of data in Greek and Russian which is ultimately used to investigate the plausibility of Indirect Negative Evidence (INE), a popular approach to the acquisition of morphological defectivity. The reported findings raise a challenge to INE.

Recommended Citation

Yakubov, Daniel, "How Do We Learn What We Cannot Say?" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5622