IPS-WASEDA system at CoNLL–SIGMORPHON 2018 shared task on morphological inflection

This paper presents the system submitted by IPS-WASEDA University for CoNLL–SIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task 1: Type level inflection. We develop a system based on a holistic approach which considers whole-word form as a unit, instead of breaking them into smaller pieces (e,g. morphemes) like the baseline systems does. We also implement an encoder-decoder model which has recently become the new standard in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The results show that the neural approach outperforms the baseline and our holistic approach on bigger resources settings. The use of data augmentation helps to improve the performance of the model in lower resources settings, although it still cannot beat the other systems. In the end, for the low resources setting, our holistic approach performs best in comparison to the baseline and the neural approach (even with data augmentation).