Morphology and Neural Networks

A Little Morphology

• "Regular" morphology
  • Affixation: suffixation, prefixation, circumfixation, infixation
  • Deletion
  • Mutation
  • Templates
  • Reduplication
• "Irregular" morphology
• Morphophonology: phonological alternation in morphemes

Morphological Tasks

• Comprehension: mapping forms to meanings
• Production: mapping meanings to forms
• Mapping forms to forms

Neural Networks and Morphological Tasks

• Feedforward neural networks
• Supervised, error-driven learning
• Representing "meanings"
• Representing forms of different lengths

The Rumelhart and McClelland Model

• Exhibited U-shaped behavior
• Represented forms of different lengths using contextualized phonemes (Wickelphones)
• Discontinuity in training set during training
• The Pinker and Prince attack
• Improvements on R & M (debate)

Learning to Recognize and Produce Words (Gasser)

• Production and comprehension in a network
• Representing words of different lengths in a recurrent network
• Relating production and comprehension through intermediate phonological representations
• Learning regular "rules" of different types (all but reduplication)
• Transfer from one "rule" to another

Last updated: 15 April 1997
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~gasser/L700/morphology.html
Comments: gasser@salsa.cs.indiana.edu
Copyright 1997, The Trustees of Indiana University