UC Santa Barbara

We present an extension of the Morfessor Baseline model of unsupervised morphological segmentation (Creutz and Lagus, 2007) that incorporates abstract templates for reduplication, a typologically common but computationally underaddressed process. Through a detailed investigation that applies the model to Māori, the Indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand, we show that incorporating templates improves Morfessor’s ability to identify instances of reduplication, and does so most when there are multiple minimally-overlapping templates. We present an error analysis that reveals important factors to consider when applying the extended model and suggests useful future directions.