Michael Ginn, Lindia Tjuatja, Enora Rice, Ali Marashian, Maria Valentini, Jasmine Xu, Graham Neubig, Alexis Palmer. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Data augmentation, a widely-employed technique for addressing data scarcity, involves generating synthetic data examples which are then used to augment available training data.Re-

Many of the world’s languages have insufficient data to train high-performing general neural machine translation (NMT) models, let alone domain-specific models, and often the only available parallel data are small amounts of religious texts. Hence, domain adaptation (DA) is a crucial issue faced by contemporary NMT and has, so far, been underexplored for low-resource languages. In this paper, we evaluate a set of methods from both low-resource NMT and DA in a realistic setting, in which we aim to translate between a high-resource and a low-resource language with access to only: a) parallel Bible data, b) a bilingual dictionary, and c) a monolingual target-domain corpus in the high-resource language. Our results show that the effectiveness of the tested methods varies, with the simplest one, DALI, being most effective. We follow up with a small human evaluation of DALI, which shows that there is still a need for more careful investigation of how to accomplish DA for low-resource NMT.

The data and compute requirements of current language modeling technology pose challenges for the processing and analysis of low-resource languages. Declarative linguistic knowledge has the potential to partially bridge this data scarcity gap by providing models with useful inductive bias in the form of language-specific rules. In this paper, we propose a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) framework backed by a large language model (LLM) to correct the output of a smaller model for the linguistic task of morphological glossing. We leverage linguistic information to make up for the lack of data and trainable parameters, while allowing for inputs from written descriptive grammars interpreted and distilled through an LLM. The results demonstrate that significant leaps in performance and efficiency are possible with the right combination of: a) linguistic inputs in the form of grammars, b) the interpretive power of LLMs, and c) the trainability of smaller token classification networks. We show that a compact, RAG-supported model is highly effective in data-scarce settings, achieving a new state-of-the-art for this task and our target languages. Our work also offers documentary linguists a more reliable and more usable tool for morphological glossing by providing well-reasoned explanations and confidence scores for each output.

Computational morphology has the potential to support language documentation through tasks like morphological segmentation and the generation of Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT).However, our research outputs have seen limited use in real-world language documentation settings.This position paper situates the disconnect between computational morphology and language documentation within a broader misalignment between research and practice in NLP and argues that the field risks becoming decontextualized and ineffectual without systematic integration of User-Centered Design (UCD).To demonstrate how principles from UCD can reshape the research agenda, we present a case study of GlossLM, a stateof-the-art multilingual IGT generation model.Through a small-scale user study with three documentary linguists, we find that, despite strong metric-based performance, the system fails to meet core usability needs in real documentation contexts.These insights raise new research questions around model constraints, label standardization, segmentation, and personalization.We argue that centering users not only produces more effective tools, but surfaces richer, more relevant research directions.

Canonical morphological segmentation is the process of analyzing words into the standard (aka underlying) forms of their constituent morphemes.This is a core task in endangered language documentation, and NLP systems have the potential to dramatically speed up this process.In typical language documentation settings, training data for canonical morpheme segmentation is scarce, making it difficult to train high quality models.However, translation data is often much more abundant, and, in this work, we present a method that attempts to leverage translation data in the canonical segmentation task.We propose a character-level sequence-to-sequence model that incorporates representations of translations obtained from pretrained high-resource monolingual language models as an additional signal.Our model outperforms the baseline in a super-low resource setting but yields mixed results on training splits with more data.Additionally, we find that we can achieve strong performance even without needing difficult-to-obtain word level alignments.While further work is needed to make translations useful in higher-resource settings, our model shows promise in severely resource-constrained settings.

This paper reports the first release of the UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) data set. UMR is a graph-based meaning representation formalism consisting of a sentence-level graph and a document-level graph. The sentence-level graph represents predicate-argument structures, named entities, word senses, aspectuality of events, as well as person and number information for entities. The document-level graph represents coreferential, temporal, and modal relations that go beyond sentence boundaries. UMR is designed to capture the commonalities and variations across languages and this is done through the use of a common set of abstract concepts, relations, and attributes as well as concrete concepts derived from words from invidual languages. This UMR release includes annotations for six languages (Arapaho, Chinese, English, Kukama, Navajo, Sanapana) that vary greatly in terms of their linguistic properties and resource availability. We also describe on-going efforts to enlarge this data set and extend it to other genres and modalities. We also briefly describe the available infrastructure (UMR annotation guidelines and tools) that others can use to create similar data sets.

Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a semantic labeling system in the AMR family designed to be uniformly applicable to typologically diverse languages. The UMR labeling system is quite thorough and can be time-consuming to execute, especially if annotators are starting from scratch. In this paper, we focus on methods for bootstrapping UMR annotations for a given language from existing resources, and specifically from typical products of language documentation work, such as lexical databases and interlinear glossed text (IGT). Using Arapaho as our test case, we present and evaluate a bootstrapping process that automatically generates UMR subgraphs from IGT. Additionally, we describe and evaluate a method for bootstrapping valency lexicon entries from lexical databases for both the target language and English. We are able to generate enough basic structure in UMR graphs from the existing Arapaho interlinearized texts to automate UMR labeling to a significant extent. Our method thus has the potential to streamline the process of building meaning representations for new languages without existing large-scale computational resources.

Language documentation projects often involve the creation of annotated text in a format such as interlinear glossed text (IGT), which captures fine-grained morphosyntactic analyses in a morpheme-by-morpheme format.However, there are few existing resources providing large amounts of standardized, easily accessible IGT data, limiting their applicability to linguistic research, and making it difficult to use such data in NLP modeling.We compile the largest existing corpus of IGT data from a variety of sources, covering over 450k examples across 1.8k languages, to enable research on crosslingual transfer and IGT generation.We normalize much of our data to follow a standard set of labels across languages.Furthermore, we explore the task of automatically generating IGT in order to aid documentation projects.As many languages lack sufficient monolingual data, we pretrain a large multilingual model on our corpus.We demonstrate the utility of this model by finetuning it on monolingual corpora, outperforming SOTA models by up to 6.6%.Our pretrained model and dataset are available on Hugging Face.

Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented.This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase.This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminology.In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types.Aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially for precise reporting of the temporal structure of situations, and future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically.

Abteen Ebrahimi, Manuel Mager, Arturo Oncevay, Vishrav Chaudhary, Luis Chiruzzo, Angela Fan, John Ortega, Ricardo Ramos, Annette Rios, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, Gustavo Giménez-Lugo, Elisabeth Mager, Graham Neubig, Alexis Palmer, Rolando Coto-Solano, Thang Vu, Katharina Kann. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

For the task of classifying verbs in context as dynamic or stative, current models approach human performance, but only for particular data sets. To better understand the performance of such models, and how well they are able to generalize beyond particular test sets, we apply the contrast set (Gardner et al., 2020) methodology to stativity classification. We create nearly 300 contrastive pairs by perturbing test set instances just enough to change their labels from one class to the other, while preserving coherence, meaning, and well-formedness. Contrastive evaluation shows that a model with near-human performance on an in-distribution test set degrades substantially when applied to transformed examples, showing that the stative vs. dynamic classification task is more complex than the model performance might otherwise suggest. Code and data are freely available.

The focus of a negation is the set of tokens intended to be negated, and a key component for revealing affirmative alternatives to negated utterances.In this paper, we experiment with neural networks to predict the focus of negation.Our main novelty is leveraging a scope detector to introduce the scope of negation as an additional input to the network.Experimental results show that doing so obtains the best results to date.Additionally, we perform a detailed error analysis providing insights into the main error categories, and analyze errors depending on whether the model takes into account scope and context information.

This paper presents WikiPossessions, a new benchmark corpus for the task of temporally-oriented possession (TOP), or tracking objects as they change hands over time. We annotate Wikipedia articles for 90 different well-known artifacts paintings, diamonds, and archaeological artifacts), producing 799 artifact-possessor relations with associated attributes. For each article, we also produce a full possession timeline. The full version of the task combines straightforward entity-relation extraction with complex temporal reasoning, as well as verification of textual support for the relevant types of knowledge. Specifically, to complete the full TOP task for a given article, a system must do the following: a) identify possessors; b) anchor possessors to times/events; c) identify temporal relations between each temporal anchor and the possession relation it corresponds to; d) assign certainty scores to each possessor and each temporal relation; and e) assemble individual possession events into a global possession timeline. In addition to the corpus, we release evaluation scripts and a baseline model for the task.

This paper describes the first robust approach to automatically labeling clauses with their situation entity type (Smith, 2003), capturing aspectual phenomena at the clause level which are relevant for interpreting both semantics at the clause level and discourse structure.Previous work on this task used a small data set from a limited domain, and relied mainly on words as features, an approach which is impractical in larger settings.We provide a new corpus of texts from 13 genres (40,000 clauses) annotated with situation entity types.We show that our sequence labeling approach using distributional information in the form of Brown clusters, as well as syntactic-semantic features targeted to the task, is robust across genres, reaching accuracies of up to 76%.