Bal Krishna Bal


2022

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Nepali Encoder Transformers: An Analysis of Auto Encoding Transformer Language Models for Nepali Text Classification
Utsav Maskey | Manish Bhatta | Shiva Bhatt | Sanket Dhungel | Bal Krishna Bal
Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages

Language model pre-training has significantly impacted NLP and resulted in performance gains on many NLP-related tasks, but comparative study of different approaches on many low-resource languages seems to be missing. This paper attempts to investigate appropriate methods for pretraining a Transformer-based model for the Nepali language. We focus on the language-specific aspects that need to be considered for modeling. Although some language models have been trained for Nepali, the study is far from sufficient. We train three distinct Transformer-based masked language models for Nepali text sequences: distilbert-base (Sanh et al., 2019) for its efficiency and minuteness, deberta-base (P. He et al., 2020) for its capability of modeling the dependency of nearby token pairs and XLM-ROBERTa (Conneau et al., 2020) for its capabilities to handle multilingual downstream tasks. We evaluate and compare these models with other Transformer-based models on a downstream classification task with an aim to suggest an effective strategy for training low-resource language models and their fine-tuning.

2021

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An End-to-End Speech Recognition for the Nepali Language
Sunil Regmi | Bal Krishna Bal
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)

In this era of AI and Deep Learning, Speech Recognition has achieved fairly good levels of accuracy and is bound to change the way humans interact with computers, which happens mostly through texts today. Most of the speech recognition systems for the Nepali language to date use conventional approaches which involve separately trained acoustic, pronunciation and language model components. Creating a pronunciation lexicon from scratch and defining phoneme sets for the language requires expert knowledge, and at the same time is time-consuming. In this work, we present an End-to-End ASR approach, which uses a joint CTC- attention-based encoder-decoder and a Recurrent Neural Network based language modeling which eliminates the need of creating a pronunciation lexicon from scratch. ESPnet toolkit which uses Kaldi Style of data preparation is the framework used for this work. The speech and transcription data used for this research is freely available on the Open Speech and Language Resources (OpenSLR). We use about 159k transcribed speech data to train the speech recognition model which currently recognizes speech input with the CER of 10.3%.

2020

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Named-Entity Based Sentiment Analysis of Nepali News Media Texts
Birat Bade Shrestha | Bal Krishna Bal
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications

Due to the general availability, relative abundance and wide diversity of opinions, news Media texts are very good sources for sentiment analysis. However, the major challenge with such texts is the difficulty in aligning the expressed opinions to the concerned political leaders as this entails a non-trivial task of named-entity recognition and anaphora resolution. In this work, our primary focus is on developing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline involving a robust Named-Entity Recognition followed by Anaphora Resolution and then after alignment of the recognized and resolved named-entities, in this case, political leaders to the correct class of opinions as expressed in the texts. We visualize the popularity of the politicians via the time series graph of positive and negative sentiments as an outcome of the pipeline. We have achieved the performance metrics of the individual components of the pipeline as follows: Part of speech tagging – 93.06% (F1-score), Named-Entity Recognition – 86% (F1-score), Anaphora Resolution – 87.45% (Accuracy), Sentiment Analysis – 80.2% (F1-score).

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Efforts Towards Developing a Tamang Nepali Machine Translation System
Binaya Kumar Chaudhary | Bal Krishna Bal | Rasil Baidar
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)

The Tamang language is spoken mainly in Nepal, Sikkim, West Bengal, some parts of Assam, and the North East region of India. As per the 2011 census conducted by the Nepal Government, there are about 1.35 million Tamang speakers in Nepal itself. In this regard, a Machine Translation System for Tamang-Nepali language pair is significant both from research and practical outcomes in terms of enabling communication between the Tamang and the Nepali communities. In this work, we train the Transformer Neural Machine Translation (NMT) architecture with attention using a small hand-labeled or aligned Tamang-Nepali corpus (15K sentence pairs). Our preliminary results show BLEU scores of 27.74 for the Nepali→Tamang direction and 23.74 in the Tamang→Nepali direction. We are currently working on increasing the datasets as well as improving the model to obtain better BLEU scores. We also plan to extend the work to add the English language to the model, thus making it a trilingual Machine Translation System for Tamang-Nepali-English languages.

2010

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Towards Building Annotated Resources for Analyzing Opinions and Argumentation in News Editorials
Bal Krishna Bal | Patrick Saint Dizier
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

This paper describes an annotation scheme for argumentation in opinionated texts such as newspaper editorials, developed from a corpus of approximately 500 English texts from Nepali and international newspaper sources. We present the results of analysis and evaluation of the corpus annotation ― currently, the inter-annotator agreement kappa value being 0.80 which indicates substantial agreement between the annotators. We also discuss some of linguistic resources (key factors for distinguishing facts from opinions, opinion lexicon, intensifier lexicon, pre-modifier lexicon, modal verb lexicon, reporting verb lexicon, general opinion patterns from the corpus etc.) developed as a result of our corpus analysis, which can be used to identify an opinion or a controversial issue, arguments supporting an opinion, orientation of the supporting arguments and their strength (intrinsic, relative and in terms of persuasion). These resources form the backbone of our work especially for performing the opinion analysis in the lower levels, i.e., in the lexical and sentence levels. Finally, we shed light on the perspectives of the given work clearly outlining the challenges.

2009

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Towards Building Advanced Natural Language Applications - An Overview of the Existing Primary Resources and Applications in Nepali
Bal Krishna Bal
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Asian Language Resources (ALR7)

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Towards an Analysis of Opinions in News Editorials: How positive was the year? (project abstract)
Bal Krishna Bal
Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Computational Semantics