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// 03 · Linguistics

Linguistics

I came to NLP through learning languages. These are the parts of linguistics I have spent the most time with, and where each one shows up in Grammario and Lociros.

01 /Morphology

How words are built from smaller pieces of meaning. Turkish stacks suffixes onto a stem, so one word can carry what English spreads across a whole phrase, and every suffix shifts its vowel to match the stem.

  • ev·ler·iniz·den

    house · plural · your · from = “from your houses”

Build bilmediysen, one suffix at a time

bilmediysen = “if you did not know”

Person ending. Says who did not know.

02 /Syntax and dependencies

Sentence structure as relations between words: which word heads a clause and which words depend on it. I work in Universal Dependencies, an annotation scheme shared across languages, so a subject or an object means the same thing in Russian as in Italian.

Same relations, different order and language

nsubjobj

VERB · root

Lemma читать. Aspect=Imp, Tense=Pres, Person=1.

03 /Agreement and case

Change one word, watch the others follow

Italian: pick the subject

mia sorella è andata

feminine singular: the possessive, the noun, and the participle all take the same ending

German: pick the verb

Ich helfe dem Mann

helfen (to help) takes the dative, so the article becomes dem

04 /Typology

Languages build meaning in different ways. Turkish is agglutinative, with one suffix per meaning. Italian is fusional, with one ending carrying several. Arabic builds words by placing a consonant root into patterns. A pipeline built for one type handles the others badly.

  • evlerinizden

    agglutinative: four pieces, four meanings

  • andata

    fusional: -a marks feminine and singular at once

  • كِتَاب · مَكْتَبَة

    root and pattern: k-t-b gives kitāb “book” and maktaba “library”

05 /Writing systems

Japanese mixes kanji with two syllabaries, and a kanji’s reading depends on the word it sits in. Arabic is written right to left and usually leaves out short vowels, so the root and pattern carry much of the reading.

  • 市場

    しじょう: 市 is read し and 場 is read じょう in this word

One kanji, four readings

先せん生せい

teacher生 is read せい here

06 /Graded input and CEFR

The validator on a real draft

Prompt: write A1 Japanese about a morning at the market

毎朝、市場に行って、魚を買っています。

ja:te_form (て)ja:te_iru (て)Fails A1, sent back for a rewrite

07 /Languages I speak

I speak Russian and study Italian, Turkish, German, Hebrew, and Japanese, and that is where the NLP work comes from. Knowing firsthand that Turkish stacks suffixes while Italian inflects is why Grammario runs a different analysis strategy per language family instead of one generic pipeline.

  • EnglishNative

  • RussianNative

  • ItalianProficient

  • TurkishProficient

  • GermanBasic

  • HebrewBasic

  • JapaneseBasic