Toward Pan-Slavic NLP: Some Experiments with Language Adaptation

Serge Sharoff


Abstract
There is great variation in the amount of NLP resources available for Slavonic languages. For example, the Universal Dependency treebank (Nivre et al., 2016) has about 2 MW of training resources for Czech, more than 1 MW for Russian, while only 950 words for Ukrainian and nothing for Belorussian, Bosnian or Macedonian. Similarly, the Autodesk Machine Translation dataset only covers three Slavonic languages (Czech, Polish and Russian). In this talk I will discuss a general approach, which can be called Language Adaptation, similarly to Domain Adaptation. In this approach, a model for a particular language processing task is built by lexical transfer of cognate words and by learning a new feature representation for a lesser-resourced (recipient) language starting from a better-resourced (donor) language. More specifically, I will demonstrate how language adaptation works in such training scenarios as Translation Quality Estimation, Part-of-Speech tagging and Named Entity Recognition.
Anthology ID:
W17-1401
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Tomaž Erjavec, Jakub Piskorski, Lidia Pivovarova, Jan Šnajder, Josef Steinberger, Roman Yangarber
Venue:
BSNLP
SIG:
SIGSLAV
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–2
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1401
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-1401
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Serge Sharoff. 2017. Toward Pan-Slavic NLP: Some Experiments with Language Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing, pages 1–2, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toward Pan-Slavic NLP: Some Experiments with Language Adaptation (Sharoff, BSNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/W17-1401.pdf
Data
Universal Dependencies