The Role of Context in Neural Morphological Disambiguation

Languages with rich morphology often introduce sparsity in language processing tasks. While morphological analyzers can reduce this sparsity by providing morpheme-level analyses for words, they will often introduce ambiguity by returning multiple analyses for the same surface form. The problem of disambiguating between these morphological parses is further complicated by the fact that a correct parse for a word is not only be dependent on the surface form but also on other words in its context. In this paper, we present a language-agnostic approach to morphological disambiguation. We address the problem of using context in morphological disambiguation by presenting several LSTM-based neural architectures that encode long-range surface-level and analysis-level contextual dependencies. We applied our approach to Turkish, Russian, and Arabic to compare effectiveness across languages, matching state-of-the-art results in two of the three languages. Our results also demonstrate that while context plays a role in learning how to disambiguate, the type and amount of context needed varies between languages.