Interactive Word Completion for Plains Cree

AbstractThe composition of richly-inflected words in morphologically complex languages can be a challenge for language learners developing literacy. Accordingly, Lane and Bird (2020) proposed a finite state approach which maps prefixes in a language to a set of possible completions up to the next morpheme boundary, for the incremental building of complex words. In this work, we develop an approach to morph-based auto-completion based on a finite state morphological analyzer of Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin), showing the portability of the concept to a much larger, more complete morphological transducer. Additionally, we propose and compare various novel ranking strategies on the morph auto-complete output. The best weighting scheme ranks the target completion in the top 10 results in 64.9% of queries, and in the top 50 in 73.9% of queries.