Towards Unsupervised and Language-independent Compound Splitting using Inflectional Morphological Transformations

In this paper, we address the task of languageindependent, knowledge-lean and unsupervised compound splitting, which is an essential component for many natural language processing tasks such as machine translation. Previous methods on statistical compound splitting either include language-specific knowledge (e.g., linking elements) or rely on parallel data, which results in limited applicability. We aim to overcome these limitations by learning compounding morphology from inflectional information derived from lemmatized monolingual corpora. In experiments for Germanic languages, we show that our approach significantly outperforms language-dependent stateof-the-art methods in finding the correct split point and that word inflection is a good approximation for compounding morphology.