Workshop on South and Southeast Asian NLP (2016)


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Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (WSSANLP2016)

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Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (WSSANLP2016)
Dekai Wu | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

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Compound Type Identification in Sanskrit: What Roles do the Corpus and Grammar Play?
Amrith Krishna | Pavankumar Satuluri | Shubham Sharma | Apurv Kumar | Pawan Goyal

We propose a classification framework for semantic type identification of compounds in Sanskrit. We broadly classify the compounds into four different classes namely, Avyayībhāva, Tatpuruṣa, Bahuvrīhi and Dvandva. Our classification is based on the traditional classification system followed by the ancient grammar treatise Adṣṭādhyāyī, proposed by Pāṇini 25 centuries back. We construct an elaborate features space for our system by combining conditional rules from the grammar Adṣṭādhyāyī, semantic relations between the compound components from a lexical database Amarakoṣa and linguistic structures from the data using Adaptor Grammars. Our in-depth analysis of the feature space highlight inadequacy of Adṣṭādhyāyī, a generative grammar, in classifying the data samples. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of using lexical databases as suggested by Amba Kulkarni and Anil Kumar, and put forward a new research direction by introducing linguistic patterns obtained from Adaptor grammars for effective identification of compound type. We utilise an ensemble based approach, specifically designed for handling skewed datasets and we %and Experimenting with various classification methods, we achieve an overall accuracy of 0.77 using random forest classifiers.

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Comparison of Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Methods on a Myanmar Pronunciation Dictionary
Ye Kyaw Thu | Win Pa Pa | Yoshinori Sagisaka | Naoto Iwahashi

Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) conversion is the task of predicting the pronunciation of a word given its graphemic or written form. It is a highly important part of both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In this paper, we evaluate seven G2P conversion approaches: Adaptive Regularization of Weight Vectors (AROW) based structured learning (S-AROW), Conditional Random Field (CRF), Joint-sequence models (JSM), phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) based point-wise classification, Weighted Finite-state Transducers (WFST) on a manually tagged Myanmar phoneme dictionary. The G2P bootstrapping experimental results were measured with both automatic phoneme error rate (PER) calculation and also manual checking in terms of voiced/unvoiced, tones, consonant and vowel errors. The result shows that CRF, PBSMT and WFST approaches are the best performing methods for G2P conversion on Myanmar language.

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Character-Aware Neural Networks for Arabic Named Entity Recognition for Social Media
Mourad Gridach

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of classifying or labelling atomic elements in the text into categories such as Person, Location or Organisation. For Arabic language, recognizing named entities is a challenging task because of the complexity and the unique characteristics of this language. In addition, most of the previous work focuses on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), however, recognizing named entities in social media is becoming more interesting these days. Dialectal Arabic (DA) and MSA are both used in social media, which is deemed as another challenging task. Most state-of-the-art Arabic NER systems count heavily on handcrafted engineering features and lexicons which is time consuming. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network architecture which benefits both from character- and word-level representations automatically, by using combination of bidirectional LSTM and Conditional Random Field (CRF), eliminating the need for most feature engineering. Moreover, our model relies on unsupervised word representations learned from unannotated corpora. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on publicly available benchmark for Arabic NER for social media and surpassing the previous system by a large margin.

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Development of a Bengali parser by cross-lingual transfer from Hindi
Ayan Das | Agnivo Saha | Sudeshna Sarkar

In recent years there has been a lot of interest in cross-lingual parsing for developing treebanks for languages with small or no annotated treebanks. In this paper, we explore the development of a cross-lingual transfer parser from Hindi to Bengali using a Hindi parser and a Hindi-Bengali parallel corpus. A parser is trained and applied to the Hindi sentences of the parallel corpus and the parse trees are projected to construct probable parse trees of the corresponding Bengali sentences. Only about 14% of these trees are complete (transferred trees contain all the target sentence words) and they are used to construct a Bengali parser. We relax the criteria of completeness to consider well-formed trees (43% of the trees) leading to an improvement. We note that the words often do not have a one-to-one mapping in the two languages but considering sentences at the chunk-level results in better correspondence between the two languages. Based on this we present a method to use chunking as a preprocessing step and do the transfer on the chunk trees. We find that about 72% of the projected parse trees of Bengali are now well-formed. The resultant parser achieves significant improvement in both Unlabeled Attachment Score (UAS) as well as Labeled Attachment Score (LAS) over the baseline word-level transferred parser.

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Sinhala Short Sentence Similarity Calculation using Corpus-Based and Knowledge-Based Similarity Measures
Jcs Kadupitiya | Surangika Ranathunga | Gihan Dias

Currently, corpus based-similarity, string-based similarity, and knowledge-based similarity techniques are used to compare short phrases. However, no work has been conducted on the similarity of phrases in Sinhala language. In this paper, we present a hybrid methodology to compute the similarity between two Sinhala sentences using a Semantic Similarity Measurement technique (corpus-based similarity measurement plus knowledge-based similarity measurement) that makes use of word order information. Since Sinhala WordNet is still under construction, we used lexical resources in performing this semantic similarity calculation. Evaluation using 4000 sentence pairs yielded an average MSE of 0.145 and a Pearson correla-tion factor of 0.832.

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Enriching Source for English-to-Urdu Machine Translation
Bushra Jawaid | Amir Kamran | Ondřej Bojar

This paper focuses on the generation of case markers for free word order languages that use case markers as phrasal clitics for marking the relationship between the dependent-noun and its head. The generation of such clitics becomes essential task especially when translating from fixed word order languages where syntactic relations are identified by the positions of the dependent-nouns. To address the problem of missing markers on source-side, artificial markers are added in source to improve alignments with its target counterparts. Up to 1 BLEU point increase is observed over the baseline on different test sets for English-to-Urdu.

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The IMAGACT4ALL Ontology of Animated Images: Implications for Theoretical and Machine Translation of Action Verbs from English-Indian Languages
Pitambar Behera | Sharmin Muzaffar | Atul Ku. Ojha | Girish Jha

Action verbs are one of the frequently occurring linguistic elements in any given natural language as the speakers use them during every linguistic intercourse. However, each language expresses action verbs in its own inherently unique manner by categorization. One verb can refer to several interpretations of actions and one action can be expressed by more than one verb. The inter-language and intra-language variations create ambiguity for the translation of languages from the source language to target language with respect to action verbs. IMAGACT is a corpus-based ontological platform of action verbs translated from prototypic animated images explained in English and Italian as meta-languages. In this paper, we are presenting the issues and challenges in translating action verbs of Indian languages as target and English as source language by observing the animated images. Among the ten Indian languages which have been annotated so far on the platform are Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Odia (Oriya), Bengali, Manipuri, Tamil, Assamese, Magahi and Marathi. Out of them, Manipuri belongs to the Sino-Tibetan, Tamil comes off the Dravidian and the rest owe their genesis to the Indo-Aryan language family. One of the issues is that the one-word morphological English verbs are translated into most of the Indian languages as verbs having more than one-word form; for instance as in the case of conjunct, compound, serial verbs and so on. We are further presenting a cross-lingual comparison of action verbs among Indian languages. In addition, we are also dealing with the issues in disambiguating animated images by the L1 native speakers using competence-based judgements and the theoretical and machine translation implications they bear.

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Crowdsourcing-based Annotation of Emotions in Filipino and English Tweets
Fermin Roberto Lapitan | Riza Theresa Batista-Navarro | Eliezer Albacea

The automatic analysis of emotions conveyed in social media content, e.g., tweets, has many beneficial applications. In the Philippines, one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, such methods could potentially enable first responders to make timely decisions despite the risk of data deluge. However, recognising emotions expressed in Philippine-generated tweets, which are mostly written in Filipino, English or a mix of both, is a non-trivial task. In order to facilitate the development of natural language processing (NLP) methods that will automate such type of analysis, we have built a corpus of tweets whose predominant emotions have been manually annotated by means of crowdsourcing. Defining measures ensuring that only high-quality annotations were retained, we have produced a gold standard corpus of 1,146 emotion-labelled Filipino and English tweets. We validate the value of this manually produced resource by demonstrating that an automatic emotion-prediction method based on the use of a publicly available word-emotion association lexicon was unable to reproduce the labels assigned via crowdsourcing. While we are planning to make a few extensions to the corpus in the near future, its current version has been made publicly available in order to foster the development of emotion analysis methods based on advanced Filipino and English NLP.

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Sentiment Analysis of Tweets in Three Indian Languages
Shanta Phani | Shibamouli Lahiri | Arindam Biswas

In this paper, we describe the results of sentiment analysis on tweets in three Indian languages – Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil. We used the recently released SAIL dataset (Patra et al., 2015), and obtained state-of-the-art results in all three languages. Our features are simple, robust, scalable, and language-independent. Further, we show that these simple features provide better results than more complex and language-specific features, in two separate classification tasks. Detailed feature analysis and error analysis have been reported, along with learning curves for Hindi and Bengali.

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Dealing with Linguistic Divergences in English-Bhojpuri Machine Translation
Pitambar Behera | Neha Mourya | Vandana Pandey

In Machine Translation, divergence is one of the major barriers which plays a deciding role in determining the efficiency of the system at hand. Translation divergences originate when there is structural discrepancies between the input and the output languages. It can be of various types based on the issues we are addressing to such as linguistic, cultural, communicative and so on. Owing to the fact that two languages owe their origin to different language families, linguistic divergences emerge. The present study attempts at categorizing different types of linguistic divergences: the lexical-semantic and syntactic. In addition, it also helps identify and resolve the divergent linguistic features between English as source language and Bhojpuri as target language pair. Dorr’s theoretical framework (1994, 1994a) has been followed in the classification and resolution procedure. Furthermore, so far as the methodology is concerned, we have adhered to the Dorr’s Lexical Conceptual Structure for the resolution of divergences. This research will prove to be beneficial for developing efficient MT systems if the mentioned factors are incorporated considering the inherent structural constraints between source and target languages.ated considering the inherent structural constraints between SL and TL pairs.

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The development of a web corpus of Hindi language and corpus-based comparative studies to Japanese
Miki Nishioka | Shiro Akasegawa

In this paper, we discuss our creation of a web corpus of spoken Hindi (COSH), one of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken mainly in the Indian subcontinent. We also point out notable problems we’ve encountered in the web corpus and the special concordancer. After observing the kind of technical problems we encountered, especially regarding annotation tagged by Shiva Reddy’s tagger, we argue how they can be solved when using COSH for linguistic studies. Finally, we mention the kinds of linguistic research that we non-native speakers of Hindi can do using the corpus, especially in pragmatics and semantics, and from a comparative viewpoint to Japanese.

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Automatic Creation of a Sentence Aligned Sinhala-Tamil Parallel Corpus
Riyafa Abdul Hameed | Nadeeshani Pathirennehelage | Anusha Ihalapathirana | Maryam Ziyad Mohamed | Surangika Ranathunga | Sanath Jayasena | Gihan Dias | Sandareka Fernando

A sentence aligned parallel corpus is an important prerequisite in statistical machine translation. However, manual creation of such a parallel corpus is time consuming, and requires experts fluent in both languages. Automatic creation of a sentence aligned parallel corpus using parallel text is the solution to this problem. In this paper, we present the first ever empirical evaluation carried out to identify the best method to automatically create a sentence aligned Sinhala-Tamil parallel corpus. Annual reports from Sri Lankan government institutions were used as the parallel text for aligning. Despite both Sinhala and Tamil being under-resourced languages, we were able to achieve an F-score value of 0.791 using a hybrid approach that makes use of a bilingual dictionary.

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Clustering-based Phonetic Projection in Mismatched Crowdsourcing Channels for Low-resourced ASR
Wenda Chen | Mark Hasegawa-Johnson | Nancy Chen | Preethi Jyothi | Lav Varshney

Acquiring labeled speech for low-resource languages is a difficult task in the absence of native speakers of the language. One solution to this problem involves collecting speech transcriptions from crowd workers who are foreign or non-native speakers of a given target language. From these mismatched transcriptions, one can derive probabilistic phone transcriptions that are defined over the set of all target language phones using a noisy channel model. This paper extends prior work on deriving probabilistic transcriptions (PTs) from mismatched transcriptions by 1) modelling multilingual channels and 2) introducing a clustering-based phonetic mapping technique to improve the quality of PTs. Mismatched crowdsourcing for multilingual channels has certain properties of projection mapping, e.g., it can be interpreted as a clustering based on singular value decomposition of the segment alignments. To this end, we explore the use of distinctive feature weights, lexical tone confusions, and a two-step clustering algorithm to learn projections of phoneme segments from mismatched multilingual transcriber languages to the target language. We evaluate our techniques using mismatched transcriptions for Cantonese speech acquired from native English and Mandarin speakers. We observe a 5-9% relative reduction in phone error rate for the predicted Cantonese phone transcriptions using our proposed techniques compared with the previous PT method.

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Improving the Morphological Analysis of Classical Sanskrit
Oliver Hellwig

The paper describes a new tagset for the morphological disambiguation of Sanskrit, and compares the accuracy of two machine learning methods (Conditional Random Fields, deep recurrent neural networks) for this task, with a special focus on how to model the lexicographic information. It reports a significant improvement over previously published results.

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Query Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval using Multilingual Word Clusters
Paheli Bhattacharya | Pawan Goyal | Sudeshna Sarkar

In Cross-Language Information Retrieval, finding the appropriate translation of the source language query has always been a difficult problem to solve. We propose a technique towards solving this problem with the help of multilingual word clusters obtained from multilingual word embeddings. We use word embeddings of the languages projected to a common vector space on which a community-detection algorithm is applied to find clusters such that words that represent the same concept from different languages fall in the same group. We utilize these multilingual word clusters to perform query translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval for three languages - English, Hindi and Bengali. We have experimented with the FIRE 2012 and Wikipedia datasets and have shown improvements over several standard methods like dictionary-based method, a transliteration-based model and Google Translate.

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A study of attention-based neural machine translation model on Indian languages
Ayan Das | Pranay Yerra | Ken Kumar | Sudeshna Sarkar

Neural machine translation (NMT) models have recently been shown to be very successful in machine translation (MT). The use of LSTMs in machine translation has significantly improved the translation performance for longer sentences by being able to capture the context and long range correlations of the sentences in their hidden layers. The attention model based NMT system (Bahdanau et al., 2014) has become the state-of-the-art, performing equal or better than other statistical MT approaches. In this paper, we wish to study the performance of the attention-model based NMT system (Bahdanau et al., 2014) on the Indian language pair, Hindi and Bengali, and do an analysis on the types or errors that occur in case when the languages are morphologically rich and there is a scarcity of large parallel training corpus. We then carry out certain post-processing heuristic steps to improve the quality of the translated statements and suggest further measures that can be carried out.

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Comprehensive Part-Of-Speech Tag Set and SVM based POS Tagger for Sinhala
Sandareka Fernando | Surangika Ranathunga | Sanath Jayasena | Gihan Dias

This paper presents a new comprehensive multi-level Part-Of-Speech tag set and a Support Vector Machine based Part-Of-Speech tagger for the Sinhala language. The currently available tag set for Sinhala has two limitations: the unavailability of tags to represent some word classes and the lack of tags to capture inflection based grammatical variations of words. The new tag set, presented in this paper overcomes both of these limitations. The accuracy of available Sinhala Part-Of-Speech taggers, which are based on Hidden Markov Models, still falls far behind state of the art. Our Support Vector Machine based tagger achieved an overall accuracy of 84.68% with 59.86% accuracy for unknown words and 87.12% for known words, when the test set contains 10% of unknown words.

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Align Me: A framework to generate Parallel Corpus Using OCRs and Bilingual Dictionaries
Priyam Bakliwal | Devadath V V | C V Jawahar

Multilingual language processing tasks like statistical machine translation and cross language information retrieval rely mainly on availability of accurate parallel corpora. Manual construction of such corpus can be extremely expensive and time consuming. In this paper we present a simple yet efficient method to generate huge amount of reasonably accurate parallel corpus with minimal user efforts. We utilize the availability of large number of English books and their corresponding translations in other languages to build parallel corpus. Optical Character Recognizing systems are used to digitize such books. We propose a robust dictionary based parallel corpus generation system for alignment of multilingual text at different levels of granularity (sentence, paragraphs, etc). We show the performance of our proposed method on a manually aligned dataset of 300 Hindi-English sentences and 100 English-Malayalam sentences.

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Learning Indonesian-Chinese Lexicon with Bilingual Word Embedding Models and Monolingual Signals
Xinying Qiu | Gangqin Zhu

We present a research on learning Indonesian-Chinese bilingual lexicon using monolingual word embedding and bilingual seed lexicons to build shared bilingual word embedding space. We take the first attempt to examine the impact of different monolingual signals for the choice of seed lexicons on the model performance. We found that although monolingual signals alone do not seem to outperform signals coverings all words, the significant improvement for learning word translation of the same signal types may suggest that linguistic features possess value for further study in distinguishing the semantic margins of the shared word embedding space.

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Creating rich online dictionaries for the Lao–French language pair, reusable for Machine Translation
Vincent Berment

In this paper, we present how we generated two rich online bilingual dictionaries — Lao-French and French-Lao — from unstructured dictionaries in Microsoft Word files. Then we shortly discuss the possible reuse of the lexical data for Machine Translation projects.