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CommonMorph: Participatory Morphological Documentation Platform

Summary

Building inflectional morphology datasets usually requires trained linguists, a lot of manual work and substantial funding, so most low-resource and endangered languages lack them. Hand-built finite-state transducers are costly to engineer and cannot handle unseen words. UniMorph covers only a small share of the world's languages and offers little room for community review. The authors present CommonMorph, an open-source web platform that divides the work among three roles. Linguists set up paradigm slots, feature agreements, lemmas and optional plain-language questions, and can reuse material from related languages already stored in the system. Speakers then fill in paradigm tables with help from automatically proposed forms, which improve through active learning as more verified entries accumulate. Other speakers confirm or correct each submission. Case studies spanning Turkic, Bantu and Semitic languages, as well as Iranic, Germanic and Italic ones, show that the platform supports fusional, agglutinative and root-and-pattern morphology, and user surveys report high satisfaction. Data is exported in UniMorph-compatible form, so it can go straight into existing NLP pipelines. This gives a reproducible route to documenting under-resourced languages.

Key points

  • Motivation: about 1,500 languages may disappear by 2100. UniMorph currently covers 169 languages, under 2.5% of the world's total. Earlier work found and fixed roughly 25% problematic forms in the Central Kurdish UniMorph data. Building an FST of neural-model quality is estimated at about 40 person-hours per language.
  • Workflow: linguists define paradigms, speakers elicit forms with model suggestions, and the community validates them. The platform stores data in separate unlabelled and labelled databases and periodically retrains its suggestion model.
  • LLM support:
    • Once two verified examples share a feature set, an LLM proposes an inflected form for a new lemma. For languages such as Kurdish, the prompt can include two verb stems.
    • A second prompt turns UniMorph tags into jargon-free elicitation questions of under 50 words for non-expert speakers.
  • Coverage tested: Turkic, Bantu and Semitic languages, plus three Indo-European branches: Iranic, Germanic and Italic.
  • Availability: free and open source at common-morph.com, with code at github.com/Aso-UniMelb/CommonMorph. Output uses the UniMorph schema.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/5gqigwzjjv4b

@inproceedings{mahmudi2026commonmorph,
  title = {{CommonMorph: Participatory Morphological Documentation Platform}},
  author = {Mahmudi, Aso and Ahmadi, Sina and Kurniawan, Kemal Maulana and Sennrich, Rico and Hovy, Eduard H. and Vylomova, Ekaterina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/5gqigwzjjv4b},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5gqigwzjjv4b}
}

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