---
title: "Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars — Sirts 2013"
description: "The authors compare three regimes: Unsupervised AGs , with three hand-designed grammars. 21 references, cited by 39 papers here."
authors: ["Kairit Sirts", "Sharon Goldwater"]
year: 2013
venue: "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/Q13-1021/"
doi: "10.1162/tacl_a_00225"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sirts-2013-minimally-supervised-morphological-segmentation-adaptor/"
---
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# Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars

**Authors:** [Kairit Sirts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/kairit-sirts/) and [Sharon Goldwater](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sharon-goldwater/) · **Year:** 2013 · **Venue:** [Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/tacl/) · **Publisher:** [The MIT Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/the-mit-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/Q13-1021/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/Q13-1021.pdf) · [DOI 10.1162/tacl\_a\_00225](https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00225) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2130935327)

**Citations:** 55 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [39](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sirts-2013-minimally-supervised-morphological-segmentation-adaptor/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks how a very small amount of annotated data can improve unsupervised morphological segmentation. Its framework is Adaptor Grammars (AGs), a nonparametric Bayesian approach that combines a PCFG with a Pitman-Yor caching adaptor to infer latent word structure. The authors compare three regimes:

- **Unsupervised AGs**, with three hand-designed grammars.
- **Semi-supervised AGs**, where gold analyses supply fixed rule counts that constrain the MCMC sampler.
- **AG Select**, a new model-selection method. A deliberately over-detailed binary metagrammar proposes many candidate split points. About 1000 gold-segmented word types are then used to choose, per language, which template of nonterminals defines the final morph boundaries.

Experiments cover English, Finnish, Turkish, German and Estonian. Evaluation uses a small dev set and the full Morpho Challenge test sets. To handle data at that scale, the learned posterior grammar is used to decode unseen words. Semi-supervision consistently beats unsupervised training. AG Select achieves the best average results and is competitive with leading semi-supervised systems. This matters because the grammar adapts to each language's morphology rather than imposing one design on all of them.

## Key points
- Three unsupervised baseline grammars are used: MorphSeq (a unigram over morphs), SubMorphs (adds a sub-morph layer) and Compounding (mimics Morfessor's implicit prefix–stem–suffix structure with compounds).
- AG Select's metagrammar is binary-branching with depth four. The chosen "majority templates" differ by language, for example English M1 M21 M2211 M2212 M222 versus Estonian M11 M12 M2.
- Test data are the Morpho Challenge sets, reaching up to three million word types. Decoding with the posterior grammar matches full transductive training in accuracy on average.
- Comparison systems include unsupervised and semi-supervised Morfessor, unsupervised Morsel, and unsupervised AGs. Results were tuned for SBF1, but the method could optimise other metrics or downstream tasks.
- The main drawback is cost: inference is cubic in word length, and AG Select is heavier than an unsupervised AG. The implementation builds on Mark Johnson's PYAG code.

*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

- [University of Edinburgh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-edinburgh/) — University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom · 202 works · 55,753 citations
- [Tallinn University of Technology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/tallinn-university-of-technology/) — University, Tallinn, Estonia · 4 works · 62,003 citations

💡 Concepts (1): [✂️ Subword tokenization](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/concepts/subword-tokenization/) · 30 works

📚 Shelves (1): [💬 Natural language processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/nlp/) · 2,549 works

🧭 Topics (1): [🧩 Morphology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/morphology/) · 245 works

## Appears in

Countries: [🌍 Estonia](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/countries/estonia/)

## Cite

Cite as: Kairit Sirts and Sharon Goldwater. 2013. Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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

```bibtex
@article{sirts2013minimally,
  title = {{Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars}},
  author = {Kairit Sirts and Sharon Goldwater},
  journal = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.1162/tacl\_a\_00225},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00225}
}
```

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## References

21 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 23 October 2026*