Named Entity Recognition for Linguistic Rapid Response in Low-Resource Languages: Sorani Kurdish and Tajik

Patrick Littell, Kartik Goyal, David R. Mortensen, Alexa Little, Chris Dyer, Lori Levin


Abstract
This paper describes our construction of named-entity recognition (NER) systems in two Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish and Tajik, as a part of a pilot study of “Linguistic Rapid Response” to potential emergency humanitarian relief situations. In the absence of large annotated corpora, parallel corpora, treebanks, bilingual lexica, etc., we found the following to be effective: exploiting distributional regularities in monolingual data, projecting information across closely related languages, and utilizing human linguist judgments. We show promising results on both a four-month exercise in Sorani and a two-day exercise in Tajik, achieved with minimal annotation costs.
Anthology ID:
C16-1095
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
998–1006
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1095
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrick Littell, Kartik Goyal, David R. Mortensen, Alexa Little, Chris Dyer, and Lori Levin. 2016. Named Entity Recognition for Linguistic Rapid Response in Low-Resource Languages: Sorani Kurdish and Tajik. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 998–1006, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Named Entity Recognition for Linguistic Rapid Response in Low-Resource Languages: Sorani Kurdish and Tajik (Littell et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/C16-1095.pdf