We introduce the SiNER: a named entity recognition (NER) dataset for low-resourced Sindhi language with quality baselines. It contains 1,338 news articles and more than 1.35 million tokens collected from Kawish and Awami Awaz Sindhi newspapers using the begin-inside-outside (BIO) tagging scheme. The proposed dataset is likely to be a significant resource for statistical Sindhi language processing. The ultimate goal of developing SiNER is to present a gold-standard dataset for Sindhi NER along with quality baselines. We implement several baseline approaches of conditional random field (CRF) and recent popular state-of-the-art bi-directional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) models. The promising F1-score of 89.16 outputted by the Bi-LSTM-CRF model with character-level representations demonstrates the quality of our proposed SiNER dataset.

Response selection plays an important role in fully automated dialogue systems. Given the dialogue context, the goal of response selection is to identify the best-matched next utterance (i.e., response) from multiple candidates. Despite the efforts of many previous useful models, this task remains challenging due to the huge semantic gap and also the large size of candidate set. To address these issues, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Matching network (STM) for response selection. In detail, soft alignment is first used to obtain the local relevance between the context and the response. And then, we construct spatio-temporal features by aggregating attention images in time dimension and make use of 3D convolution and pooling operations to extract matching information. Evaluation on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks has demonstrated that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model. Particularly, visualization analysis shows that the spatio-temporal features enables matching information in segment pairs and time sequences, and have good interpretability for multi-turn text matching.