Neural language models play an increasingly central role for language processing, given their success for a range of NLP tasks. In this study, we compare some canonical strategies in language modeling for low-resource scenarios, evaluating all models by their (finetuned) performance on a POS-tagging downstream task. We work with five (extremely) low-resource dialects from the Indic dialect continuum (Braj, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili), which are closely related to each other and the standard mid-resource dialect, Hindi. The strategies we evaluate broadly include from-scratch pretraining, and cross-lingual transfer between the dialects as well as from different kinds of off-the- shelf multilingual models; we find that a model pretrained on other mid-resource Indic dialects and languages, with extended pretraining on target dialect data, consistently outperforms other models. We interpret our results in terms of dataset sizes, phylogenetic relationships, and corpus statistics, as well as particularities of this linguistic system.

We present a novel method for unsupervised cognate/borrowing identification from monolingual corpora designed for low and extremely low resource scenarios, based on combining noisy semantic signals from joint bilingual spaces with orthographic cues modelling sound change. We apply our method to the North Indian dialect continuum, containing several dozens of dialects and languages spoken by more than 100 million people. Many of these languages are zero-resource and therefore natural language processing for them is non-existent. We first collect monolingual data for 26 Indic languages, 16 of which were previously zero-resource, and perform exploratory character, lexical and subword cross-lingual alignment experiments for the first time at this scale on this dialect continuum. We create bilingual evaluation lexicons against Hindi for 20 of the languages. We then apply our cognate identification method on the data, and show that our method outperforms both traditional orthography baselines as well as EM-style learnt edit distance matrices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine traditional orthographic cues with noisy bilingual embeddings to tackle unsupervised cognate detection in a (truly) low-resource setup, showing that even noisy bilingual embeddings can act as good guides for this task. We release our multilingual dialect corpus, called HinDialect, as well as our scripts for evaluation data collection and cognate induction.

Our work aims at developing a multilingual data resource for morphological segmentation. We present a survey of 17 existing data resources relevant for segmentation in 32 languages, and analyze diversity of how individual linguistic phenomena are captured across them. Inspired by the success of Universal Dependencies, we propose a harmonized scheme for segmentation representation, and convert the data from the studied resources into this common scheme. Harmonized versions of resources available under free licenses are published as a collection called UniSegments 1.0.

Word embeddings are growing to be a crucial resource in the field of NLP for any language. This work introduces a novel technique for static subword embeddings transfer for Indic languages from a relatively higher resource language to a genealogically related low resource language. We primarily work with HindiMarathi, simulating a low-resource scenario for Marathi, and confirm observed trends on Nepali. We demonstrate the consistent benefits of unsupervised morphemic segmentation on both source and target sides over the treatment performed by fastText. Our best-performing approach uses an EM-style approach to learning bilingual subword embeddings; we also show, for the first time, that a trivial “copyand-paste” embeddings transfer based on even perfect bilingual lexicons is inadequate in capturing language-specific relationships. We find that our approach substantially outperforms the fastText baselines for both Marathi and Nepali on the Word Similarity task as well as WordNetBased Synonymy Tests; on the former task, its performance for Marathi is close to that of pretrained fastText embeddings that use three orders of magnitude more Marathi data.

Verbal prediction has been shown to be critical during online comprehension of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages. In this work we present three computational models to predict clause final verbs in Hindi given its prior arguments. The models differ in their use of prior context during the prediction process – the context is either noisy or noise-free. Model predictions are compared with the sentence completion data obtained from Hindi native speakers. Results show that models that assume noisy context outperform the noise-free model. In particular, a lossy context model that assumes prior context to be affected by predictability and recency captures the distribution of the predicted verb class and error sources best. The success of the predictability-recency lossy context model is consistent with the noisy channel hypothesis for sentence comprehension and supports the idea that the reconstruction of the context during prediction is driven by prior linguistic exposure. These results also shed light on the nature of the noise that affects the reconstruction process. Overall the results pose a challenge to the adaptability hypothesis that assumes use of noise-free preverbal context for robust verbal prediction.

Technical terms may require special handling when the target audience is bilingual, depending on the cultural and educational norms of the society in question. In particular, certain translation scenarios may require “term retention” i.e. preserving of the source language technical terms in the target language output to produce a fluent and comprehensible code-switched sentence. We show that a standard transformer-based machine translation model can be adapted easily to perform this task with little or no damage to the general quality of its output. We present an English-to-Hindi model that is trained to obey a “retain” signal, i.e. it can perform the required code-mixing on a list of terms, possibly unseen, provided at runtime. We perform automatic evaluation using BLEU as well as F1 metrics on the list of retained terms; we also collect manual judgments on the quality of the output sentences.

English-Hindi machine translation systems have difficulty interpreting verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English, and commit errors in translating sentences with VPE. We present a solution and theoretical backing for the treatment of English VPE, with the specific scope of enabling English-Hindi MT, based on an understanding of the syntactical phenomenon of verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis in Hindi (VVPE). We implement a rule-based system to perform the following sub-tasks: 1) Verb ellipsis identification in the English source sentence, 2) Elided verb phrase head identification 3) Identification of verb segment which needs to be induced at the site of ellipsis 4) Modify input sentence; i.e. resolving VPE and inducing the required verb segment. This system obtains 94.83 percent precision and 83.04 percent recall on subtask (1), tested on 3900 sentences from the BNC corpus. This is competitive with state-of-the-art results. We measure accuracy of subtasks (2) and (3) together, and obtain a 91 percent accuracy on 200 sentences taken from the WSJ corpus. Finally, in order to indicate the relevance of ellipsis handling to MT, we carried out a manual analysis of the English-Hindi MT outputs of 100 sentences after passing it through our system. We set up a basic metric (1-5) for this evaluation, where 5 indicates drastic improvement, and obtained an average of 3.55. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to target ellipsis resolution in the context of improving English-Hindi machine translation.