Unsupervised Morpheme Analysis -- Morpho Challenge 2007
Part of the EU Network of Excellence PASCAL Challenge Program and organized in collaboration with CLEF 2007 (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum). Participation is open to all.

The objective of the Challenge is to design a statistical machine learning algorithm that discovers which morphemes (smallest individually meaningful units of language) words consist of. Ideally, these are basic vocabulary units suitable for different tasks, such as text understanding, machine translation, information retrieval, and statistical language modeling.

The scientific goals are:

• To learn of the phenomena underlying word construction in natural languages
• To discover approaches suitable for a wide range of languages
• To advance machine learning methodology

Morpho Challenge 2007 is a follow-up to our previous Morpho Challenge 2005 (Unsupervised Segmentation of Words into Morphemes). The task of Morpho Challenge 2007 is more general in that we are not necessarily looking for an explicit segmentation of words this time, but a morpheme analysis of the word forms in the data. (For instance, the English words "boot, boots, foot, feet" might obtain the analyses "boot, boot + plural, foot, foot + plural", respectively.)

Participation in the previous challenge is by no means a prerequisite for participation in Morpho Challenge 2007. Everyone is welcome and we hope to attract many participating teams. The results will be presented in a workshop arranged in conjunction with CLEF 2007 (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum). Please read the rules and see the schedule. The datasets are available for download. Submit your analyses (result files) by sending them by email to the organizers, or by indicating a location where the organizers can download your files. Remember also to describe your algorithm in an extended abstract. Please read the formatting instructions in rules.

The result tables from the latest evaluation runs are now in the Results page.

We are looking forward to an interesting competition!

Mikko Kurimo, Mathias Creutz and Matti Varjokallio
Adaptive Informatics Research Centre, Helsinki University of Technology
The organizers

Program committee

Levent Arslan, Boğaziçi University
Eric Atwell, University of Leeds
Samy Bengio, Google
Tolga Cilogu, Middle-East Technical University
Kadri Hacioglu, Colorado University
Colin de la Higuera, Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne
Chun Yu Kit, City University of Hong Kong
Dietrich Klakow, Saarland University
James Martin, University of Colorado at Boulder
Jan Nouza,Technical University of Liberec
Erkki Oja, Helsinki University of Technology
Murat Saraçlar, Boğaziçi University
Richard Sproat, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Richard Wicentowski, Swarthmore College

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