Trankit: A Light-Weight Transformer-based Toolkit for Multilingual Natural Language Processing

Minh Van Nguyen, Viet Dac Lai, Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Thien Huu Nguyen

Abstract
We introduce Trankit, a light-weight Transformer-based Toolkit for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP). It provides a trainable pipeline for fundamental NLP tasks over 100 languages, and 90 pretrained pipelines for 56 languages. Built on a state-of-the-art pretrained language model, Trankit significantly outperforms prior multilingual NLP pipelines over sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, morphological feature tagging, and dependency parsing while maintaining competitive performance for tokenization, multi-word token expansion, and lemmatization over 90 Universal Dependencies treebanks. Despite the use of a large pretrained transformer, our toolkit is still efficient in memory usage and speed. This is achieved by our novel plug-and-play mechanism with Adapters where a multilingual pretrained transformer is shared across pipelines for different languages. Our toolkit along with pretrained models and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/trankit. A demo website for our toolkit is also available at: http://nlp.uoregon.edu/trankit. Finally, we create a demo video for Trankit at: https://youtu.be/q0KGP3zGjGc.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-demos.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dimitra Gkatzia, Djamé Seddah
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
80–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-demos.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-demos.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minh Van Nguyen, Viet Dac Lai, Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, and Thien Huu Nguyen. 2021. Trankit: A Light-Weight Transformer-based Toolkit for Multilingual Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 80–90, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Trankit: A Light-Weight Transformer-based Toolkit for Multilingual Natural Language Processing (Nguyen et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2021.eacl-demos.10.pdf
Code
 nlp-uoregon/trankit
Data
CoNLL 2003
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