---
title: "Joint Lemmatization and Morphological Tagging with Lemming"
description: "The authors present LEMMING, a log-linear lemmatizer. 31 references, cited by 50 papers here."
authors: ["Thomas Müller", "Ryan Cotterell", "Alexander Fraser", "Hinrich Schütze"]
year: 2015
venue: "Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/D15-1272/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/d15-1272"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/muller-2015-joint-lemmatization-morphological-tagging-lemming/"
---
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# Joint Lemmatization and Morphological Tagging with Lemming

**Authors:** [Thomas Müller](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/thomas-muller/), [Ryan Cotterell](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ryan-cotterell/), [Alexander Fraser](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/alexander-fraser/) and [Hinrich Schütze](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/hinrich-schutze/) · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/) ([EMNLP 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/2015/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/D15-1272/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/D15-1272.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/d15-1272](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d15-1272) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251386579)

**Citations:** 130 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [50](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/muller-2015-joint-lemmatization-morphological-tagging-lemming/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Lemmatizing a token and predicting its POS and morphological attributes depend on each other. Tags often resolve which lemma is correct. In the other direction, knowing the lemma helps resolve syncretic forms, such as gender on German plural nouns. Most systems still run these steps as a pipeline, and earlier lemmatizers could not use global features of the candidate lemma.

The authors present LEMMING, a log-linear lemmatizer. It builds candidate lemmata by applying edit trees extracted from training pairs. It then scores each candidate with several feature groups:
- edit-tree features
- character-alignment features
- lemma affix features
- dictionary features (Wikipedia frequency, ASPELL)

All features are conjoined with POS and morphological attributes. In the joint version, LEMMING is combined with the MarMoT higher-order CRF tagger in a tree-structured CRF. The model is trained with SGD, uses belief propagation for inference, and is initialized from a pretrained tagger. It needs only corpora annotated with gold tags and lemmata, with no morphological analyzer.

Across six languages, LEMMING beats the MORFETTE and JCK baselines, with the biggest gains on unknown words. The results show that joint modeling helps both tagging and lemmatization.

## Key points
- Evaluated on English, German, Czech, Hungarian, Latin and Spanish. For Czech, lemmatization error falls by about 60% (4.05 → 1.58).
- Edit-tree candidate generation yields between 7 (Hungarian) and 91 (Czech) candidates per form on average. The correct lemma is among the candidates over 99.4% of the time on dev, except Latin (98.4%).
- The joint model (LEMMING-J) significantly improves tag+lemma accuracy for four of the six languages. For Czech, it cuts lemma errors by more than 37% and tag+lemma errors by more than 6%.
- On unknown forms, the best models beat the best baseline by more than 12 points for Czech and Latin, and by more than 5 points for German, Spanish and Hungarian.
- The software is released as open source at http://cistern.cis.lmu.de/lemming.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Johns Hopkins University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/johns-hopkins-university/) — University, Baltimore, United States · 187 works · 92,194 citations
- [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/ludwig-maximilians-universitat-munchen/) — University, Munich, Germany · 44 works · 55,193 citations

📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 9,086 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 8,889 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics (1): [🧩 Morphology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/morphology/) · 277 works

## Cite

Cite as: Thomas Müller, Ryan Cotterell, Alexander Fraser and Hinrich Schütze. 2015. Joint Lemmatization and Morphological Tagging with Lemming. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{muller2015joint,
  title = {{Joint Lemmatization and Morphological Tagging with Lemming}},
  author = {Thomas Müller, Ryan Cotterell, Alexander Fraser and Hinrich Schütze},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/d15-1272},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d15-1272}
}
```

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*Updated 24 October 2026*