Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation for Low-Resource Polysynthetic Languages

Polysynthetic languages pose a challenge for morphological analysis due to the rootmorpheme complexity and to the word class "squish". In addition, many of these polysynthetic languages are low-resource. We propose unsupervised approaches for morphological segmentation of low-resource polysynthetic languages based on Adaptor Grammars (AG) We experiment with four languages from the Uto-Aztecan family. Our AG-based approaches outperform other unsupervised approaches and show promise when compared to supervised methods, outperforming them on two of the four languages.