UniMorph 4.0: Universal Morphology

TL;DR

UniMorph 4.0 expands a multilingual morphological database with 67 new languages, schema improvements, morpheme segmentation, and derivational morphology, enhancing its coverage and linguistic inclusiveness.

Contribution

The paper introduces significant updates to UniMorph, including new languages, schema enhancements, morpheme segmentation, and derivational morphology integration.

Findings

Added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered ones

Improved extraction pipeline for missing morphological features

Augmented database with morpheme segmentation and derivational data

Abstract

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.