@inproceedings{riabi-etal-2021-character,
    title = "Can Character-based Language Models Improve Downstream Task Performances In Low-Resource And Noisy Language Scenarios?",
    author = "Riabi, Arij  and
      Sagot, Beno{\^i}t  and
      Seddah, Djam{\'e}",
    editor = "Xu, Wei  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Baldwin, Tim  and
      Rahimi, Afshin",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2021)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2021.wnut-1.47/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.wnut-1.47",
    pages = "423--436",
    abstract = "Recent impressive improvements in NLP, largely based on the success of contextual neural language models, have been mostly demonstrated on at most a couple dozen high- resource languages. Building language mod- els and, more generally, NLP systems for non- standardized and low-resource languages remains a challenging task. In this work, we fo- cus on North-African colloquial dialectal Arabic written using an extension of the Latin script, called NArabizi, found mostly on social media and messaging communication. In this low-resource scenario with data display- ing a high level of variability, we compare the downstream performance of a character-based language model on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing to that of monolingual and multilingual models. We show that a character-based model trained on only 99k sentences of NArabizi and fined-tuned on a small treebank of this language leads to performance close to those obtained with the same architecture pre- trained on large multilingual and monolingual models. Confirming these results a on much larger data set of noisy French user-generated content, we argue that such character-based language models can be an asset for NLP in low-resource and high language variability set- tings."
}