Simple Models for Word Formation in English Slang

What it is about

The paper models three kinds of irregular word formation in English slang: blends (such as "fantabulous" from "fantastic" and "fabulous"), clippings (such as "prof" from "professor"), and reduplicatives (such as "boo-boo"). For blends it uses a character-level sequence model (CopyCat-style, with a language-model term and a length term) to choose which parts of the two source words to keep, and it reports edit distance on two datasets. On the D_knight blend data the single model scores 1.98, its ensemble 1.91, and the best prior model 1.76. For clippings it uses a phoneme-aware and a grapheme-based probabilistic model on 173 clippings, with mean edit distance 3.39 and 2.65 against a naive baseline of 4.6. For reduplicatives it uses a generative model with phonetic constraints and reports MIR on 50 held-out items; it beats the baselines by at least 8 percentage points. Most blend outputs (99.0% on D_knight) use only characters that appear in the two source words.

Ideas

• I1. Blend check in en/src/morph.rs: a candidate blend is valid only if all its characters come from the two source words, in order, and its length is at most the longer source. The paper finds 99% of blends obey this, so use the check as a rule and count the exceptions.
• I2. Reduplicative rule table: encode the patterns the paper names (duplication, and the exchange of the initial vowel or consonant) as a closed set of rules in en/src/morph.rs, each with a count of matches in the open text, so every reduplicative can say which pattern fired.
• I3. Clipping as a deterministic choice of cut point: among the cut points that keep a stressed syllable, choose the one with the highest count in Mova's open text, and report the edit distance against a fixed clipping list.
• I4. Negative control: give the blend rule two unrelated words; the rule must find no valid blend, or the character check is not doing anything.

For Mova

The chapters are languages/en/18-compounding-conversion-minor.md (blends, clippings, reduplicatives as minor word formation). The code is en/src/morph.rs. The measure: the rate of valid blends under the character rule, and mean edit distance on a held-out list, run twice. The paper's data and text are licensed for reading only: use the summary and the design, and build the rule tables from Mova's own open sources.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 1804.02596

@misc{kulkarni2018simple,
  title = {{Simple Models for Word Formation in English Slang}},
  author = {Kulkarni, Vivek and Wang, William Yang},
  year = {2018},
  eprint = {1804.02596},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02596}
}

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