Unsupervised Learning of Morphology

Abstract

This article surveys work on Unsupervised Learning of Morphology. We define Unsupervised Learning of Morphology as the problem of inducing a description (of some kind, even if only morpheme-segmentation) of how orthographic words are built up given only raw text data of a language. We briefly go through the history and motivation of the this problem. Next, over 200 items of work are listed with a brief characterization, and the most important ideas in the field are critically discussed. We summarize the achievements so far and give pointers for future developments.