The SIGMORPHON 2016 Shared Task—Morphological Reinflection

Abstract

The 2016 SIGMORPHON Shared Task was devoted to the problem of morphological reinflection. It introduced morphological datasets for 10 languages with diverse ty-pological characteristics. The shared task drew submissions from 9 teams representing 11 institutions reflecting a variety of approaches to addressing supervised learning of reinflection. For the simplest task, in-flection generation from lemmas, the best system averaged 95.56% exact-match accuracy across all languages, ranging from Maltese (88.99%) to Hungarian (99.30%). With the relatively large training datasets provided, recurrent neural network architectures consistently performed best—in fact, there was a significant margin between neural and non-neural approaches. The best neural approach, averaged over all tasks and languages, outperformed the best non-neural one by 13.76% absolute; on individual tasks and languages the gap in accuracy sometimes exceeded 60%. Overall, the results show a strong state of the art, and serve as encouragement for future shared tasks that explore morphological analysis and generation with varying degrees of supervision.