Catherine I. Watson

Also published as: Catherine Watson


2022

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Language Models for Code-switch Detection of te reo Māori and English in a Low-resource Setting
Jesin James | Vithya Yogarajan | Isabella Shields | Catherine Watson | Peter Keegan | Keoni Mahelona | Peter-Lucas Jones
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Te reo Māori, New Zealand’s only indigenous language, is code-switched with English. Māori speakers are atleast bilingual, and the use of Māori is increasing in New Zealand English. Unfortunately, due to the minimal availability of resources, including digital data, Māori is under-represented in technological advances. Cloud-based multilingual systems such as Google and Microsoft Azure support Māori language detection. However, we provide experimental evidence to show that the accuracy of such systems is low when detecting Māori. Hence, with the support of Māori community, we collect Māori and bilingual data to use natural language processing (NLP) to improve Māori language detection. We train bilingual sub-word embeddings and provide evidence to show that our bilingual embeddings improve overall accuracy compared to the publicly-available monolingual embeddings. This improvement has been verified for various NLP tasks using three bilingual databases containing formal transcripts and informal social media data. We also show that BiLSTM with pre-trained Māori-English sub-word embeddings outperforms large-scale contextual language models such as BERT on down streaming tasks of detecting Māori language. However, this research uses large models ‘as is’ for transfer learning, where no further training was done on Māori-English data. The best accuracy of 87% was obtained using BiLSTM with bilingual embeddings to detect Māori-English code-switching points.

2009

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Towards a flexible platform for voice accent and expression selection on a Healthcare Robot
Aleksandar Igic | Catherine Watson | Jonathan Teutenberg | Elizabeth Broadbent | Rie Tamagawa | Bruce MacDonald
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2009

2005

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Design and Development of a Speech-driven Control for a In-car Personal Navigation System
Ying Su | Tao Bai | Catherine I. Watson
Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2005

2000

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Matching a tone-based and tune-based approach to English intonation for concept-to-speech generation
Elke Teich | Catherine I. Watson | Cecile Pereira
COLING 2000 Volume 2: The 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics