Unsupervised Deep Language and Dialect Identification for Short Texts

Koustava Goswami, Rajdeep Sarkar, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Theodorus Fransen, John P. McCrae


Abstract
Automatic Language Identification (LI) or Dialect Identification (DI) of short texts of closely related languages or dialects, is one of the primary steps in many natural language processing pipelines. Language identification is considered a solved task in many cases; however, in the case of very closely related languages, or in an unsupervised scenario (where the languages are not known in advance), performance is still poor. In this paper, we propose the Unsupervised Deep Language and Dialect Identification (UDLDI) method, which can simultaneously learn sentence embeddings and cluster assignments from short texts. The UDLDI model understands the sentence constructions of languages by applying attention to character relations which helps to optimize the clustering of languages. We have performed our experiments on three short-text datasets for different language families, each consisting of closely related languages or dialects, with very minimal training sets. Our experimental evaluations on these datasets have shown significant improvement over state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and our model has outperformed state-of-the-art LI and DI systems in supervised settings.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.141
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1606–1617
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.141
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.141
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Koustava Goswami, Rajdeep Sarkar, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Theodorus Fransen, and John P. McCrae. 2020. Unsupervised Deep Language and Dialect Identification for Short Texts. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1606–1617, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Deep Language and Dialect Identification for Short Texts (Goswami et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.coling-main.141.pdf