This study addresses the widening gap in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research between high resource and extremely low resource languages, with a particular focus on Manchu, a severely endangered language. Manchu exemplifies the challenges faced by marginalized linguistic communities in accessing state-of-the-art technologies. In a pioneering effort, we introduce the first-ever Manchu ASR model ManWav, leveraging Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53. The results of the first Manchu ASR is promising, especially when trained with our augmented data. Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 fine-tuned with augmented data demonstrates a 0.02 drop in CER and 0.13 drop in WER compared to the same base model fine-tuned with original data.

This study examines whether the attention scores between tokens in the BERT model significantly vary based on lexical categories during the fine-tuning process for downstream tasks. Drawing inspiration from the notion that in human language processing, syntactic and semantic information is parsed differently, we categorize tokens in sentences according to their lexical categories and focus on changes in attention scores among these categories. Our hypothesis posits that in downstream tasks that prioritize semantic information, attention scores centered on content words are enhanced, while in cases emphasizing syntactic information, attention scores centered on function words are intensified. Through experimentation conducted on six tasks from the GLUE benchmark dataset, we substantiate our hypothesis regarding the fine-tuning process. Furthermore, our additional investigations reveal the presence of BERT layers that consistently assign more bias to specific lexical categories, irrespective of the task, highlighting the existence of task-agnostic lexical category preferences.

Instruction Tuning on Large Language Models is an essential process for model to function well and achieve high performance in the specific tasks. Accordingly, in mainstream languages such as English, instruction-based datasets are being constructed and made publicly available. In the case of Korean, publicly available models and datasets all rely on using the output of ChatGPT or translating datasets built in English. In this paper, We introduce KIT-19 as an instruction dataset for the development of LLM in Korean. KIT-19 is a dataset created in an instruction format, comprising 19 existing open-source datasets for Korean NLP tasks. In this paper, we train a Korean Pretrained LLM using KIT-19 to demonstrate its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the model trained on KIT-19 significantly outperforms existing Korean LLMs. Based on the its quality and empirical results, this paper proposes that KIT-19 has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the future improvement of Korean LLMs’ performance.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in medical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Yet, there has not been an open-source medical NER dataset specifically for the Korean language. To address this, we utilized ChatGPT to assist in constructing the KBMC (Korean Bio-Medical Corpus), which we are now presenting to the public. With the KBMC dataset, we noticed an impressive 20% increase in medical NER performance compared to models trained on general Korean NER datasets. This research underscores the significant benefits and importance of using specialized tools and datasets, like ChatGPT, to enhance language processing in specialized fields such as healthcare.

We present pioneering research in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the endangered Manchu language. Recognizing the critical importance of linguistic preservation, we experiment with three language models – BiLSTM-CRF, BERT, and mBERT – for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging tasks. Given the limited digitized Manchu text available, we augment the data using GloVe embeddings for the pre-training of BERT-based models. Remarkably, all models demonstrated outstanding performance, achieving over 90% F1 score in both NER and POS tagging tasks. Our research not only marks the first application of NLP on Manchu and the inaugural use of BERT-based models for the language but also stands as the first endeavor to employ Manchu for NER and POS tagging. To foster further exploration and applications in the field, we make our fine-tuning dataset and models available to the public. Through this research, we aim to underscore the significance of NLP in the protection and revitalization of low-resource languages.