Canada

Multilingual models such as mBERT have been demonstrated to exhibit impressive 
cross-lingual transfer for a number of languages. Despite this, the performance drops for lower-resourced languages, especially when they are not part of the pre-training setup and when there are script differences.
In this work we consider Maltese, a low-resource language of Arabic and Romance origins written in Latin script. Specifically, we investigate the impact of transliterating Maltese into Arabic scipt on a number of downstream tasks: Part-of-Speech Tagging, Dependency Parsing, and Sentiment Analysis. We compare multiple transliteration pipelines ranging from deterministic character maps to more sophisticated alternatives, including manually annotated word mappings and non-deterministic character mappings. For the latter, we show that selection techniques using n-gram language models of Tunisian Arabic, the dialect with the highest degree of mutual intelligibility to Maltese, yield better results on downstream tasks. Moreover, our experiments highlight that the use of an Arabic pre-trained model paired with transliteration outperforms mBERT. Overall, our results show that transliterating Maltese can be considered an option to improve the cross-lingual transfer capabilities.

ACL 2023

Exploring the impact of transliteration on NLP performance for low-resource languages: the case of Malese and Arabic

maltese

transliteration

arabic

low-resource languages

cross-lingual transfer

fine-tuning

bert

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

We propose methods for transliterating English loanwords in Japanese from their Japanese written form (katakana/romaji) to their original English written form. Our data is a Japanese-English loanwords dictionary that we have created ourselves. We employ two approaches: direct transliteration, which directly converts words from katakana to English, and indirect transliteration, which utilizes the English pronunciation as a means to convert katakana words into their corresponding English sound representations, which are subsequently converted into English words. Additionally, we compare the effectiveness of using katakana versus romaji as input characters. We develop 6 models of 2 types for our experiments: one with an English lexicon-filter, and the other without. For each type, we built 3 models, including a pair n-gram based on WFSTs and two sequence-to-sequence models leveraging LSTM and transformer. Our best performing model was the pair n-gram model with a lexicon- filter, directly transliterating from katakana to English.

Back-transliteration of English loanwords in Japanese

Japanese writing is a complex system, and a large part of the complexity resides in the use of kanji. A single kanji character in modern Japanese may have multiple pronunciations, either as native vocabulary or as words borrowed from Chinese. This causes a problem for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) because the system has to predict which pronunciation of each kanji character is appropriate in the context. The problem is called homograph disambiguation. To solve the problem, this research provides a new annotated Japanese single kanji character pronunciation data set and describes an experiment using the logistic regression (LR) classifier. A baseline is computed to compare with the LR classifier accuracy. This experiment provides the first experimental research in Japanese single kanji homograph disambiguation. The annotated Japanese data is freely released to the public to support further work.

Pronunciation ambiguities in Japanese kanji

A numeration system encodes abstract numeric quantities as concrete strings of written characters. The numeration systems used by modern scripts tend to be precise and unambiguous, but this was not so for the ancient and partially-deciphered proto-Elamite (PE) script, where written numerals can have up to four distinct readings depending on the system that is used to read them. We consider the task of disambiguating between these readings in order to determine the values of the numeric quantities recorded in this corpus. We algorithmically extract a list of possible readings for each PE numeral notation, and contribute two disambiguation techniques based on structural properties of the original documents and classifiers learned with the bootstrapping algorithm. We also contribute a test set for evaluating disambiguation techniques, as well as a novel approach to cautious rule selection for bootstrapped classifiers. Our analysis confirms existing intuitions about this script and reveals previously-unknown correlations between tablet content and numeral magnitude. This work is crucial to understanding and deciphering PE, as the corpus is heavily accounting focused and contains many more numeric tokens than tokens of text.

Disambiguating numeral sequences to decipher ancient accounting corpora

This paper presents a new approach to the ancient scripts decipherment problem based on combinatorial optimisation and coupled simulated annealing, an advanced non-convex optimisation procedure. Solutions are encoded by using k-permutations allowing for null, one-to-many, and many-to-one mappings between signs.
The proposed system is able to produce enhanced results in cognate identification when compared to the state-of-the-art systems on standard evaluation benchmarks used in literature.

Decipherment of lost ancient scripts as combinatorial optimisation using coupled simulated annealing

A crucial step in deciphering a text is to identify what set of characters were used to write it. This requires grouping character tokens according to visual and contextual features, which can be challenging for human analysts when the number of tokens or underlying types is large. Prior work has shown that this process can be automated by clustering dense representations of character images, in a task which we call “script clustering”. In this work, we present novel architectures which exploit varying degrees of contextual and visual information to learn representations for use in script clustering. We evaluate on a range of modern and ancient scripts, and find that our models produce representations which are more effective for script recovery than the current state-of-theart, despite using just 2% as many parameters. Our analysis fruitfully applies these models to assess hypotheses about the character inventory of the partially-deciphered proto-Elamite script.

Learning the character inventories of undeciphered scripts using unsuperivsed deep clustering

Handwritten texts produced by young learn- ers often contain orthographic features like spelling errors, capitalization errors, punctuation errors, and impurities such as strikethroughs, inserts, and smudges. All of those are typically normalized or ignored in existing transcriptions. For applications like handwriting recognition with the goal of automatically analyzing a learner’s language performance, however, retaining such features would be necessary. To address this, we present transcription guidelines that retain the features addressed above. Our guidelines were developed iteratively and include numerous example images to illustrate the various issues. On a subset of about 90 double-transcribed texts, we compute inter-annotator agreement and show that our guidelines can be applied with high levels of percentage agreement of about .98. Overall, we transcribed 1,350 learner texts, which is about the same size as the widely adopted handwriting recognition datasets IAM (1,500 pages) and CVL (1,600 pages). Our final corpus can be used to train a handwriting recognition system that transcribes closely to the real productions by young learners. Such a system is a prerequisite for applying automatic orthography feedback systems to handwritten texts in the future.

Preserving the authenticity of handwritten learner language: annotation guidelines for creating transcripts retaining orthographic features

We investigate how well words in the polysynthetic language Inuktitut can be translated by combining dictionary definitions, without use of a neural machine translation model trained on parallel text. Such a translation system would allow natural language technology to benefit from resources designed for community use in a language revitalization or education program, rather than requiring a separate parallel corpus. We show that the text-to-text generation capabilities of GPT-3 allow it to perform this task with BLEU scores of up to 18.5. We investigate prompting GPT-3 to provide multiple translations, which can help slightly, and providing it with grammar information, which is mostly ineffective. Finally, we test GPT-3's ability to derive morpheme definitions from whole-word translations, but find this process is prone to errors including hallucinations.

Translating a low-resource language using GPT-3 and a human-readable dictionary

Revisiting and Amending Central Kurdish Data on UniMorph 4.0

Linguistic analysis is a core task in the process of documenting, analyzing, and describing endangered and less-studied languages. 
In addition to providing insight into the properties of the language being studied, having tools to automatically label words in a language for the grammatical category and morphological features can support a range of applications useful for language pedagogy and revitalization.
At the same time, most modern NLP methods for these tasks require both large amounts of data in the language and compute costs well beyond the capacity of most research groups and language communities.

Here, we present a gloss-to-gloss (g2g) model for linguistic analysis (specifically, morphological analysis and part-of-speech tagging) that is lightweight in terms of both data requirements and computational expense.
The model is designed for the interlinear glossed text (IGT) format, in which we expect the source text of a sentence in a low-resource language, a translation of that sentence into a language of wider communication, and a detailed glossing of the morphological properties of each word in the sentence.

We test the model on both low-resource and high-resource languages and find that our simple CNN-based model achieves comparable performance to a state-of-the-art transformer-based model, at a fraction of the computational cost.

Lightweight morpheme labeling in context: Using structured linguistic representations to support linguistic analysis for the language documentation context

The process of lexical blending is difficult to reliably predict. This difficulty has been shown by machine learning approaches in blend modeling, including attempts using then state-of-the-art LSTM deep neural networks trained on character embeddings, which were able to predict lexical blends given the ordered constituent words in less than half of cases, at maximum. This project introduces a novel model architecture which dramatically increases the correct prediction rates for lexical blends, using only Polynomial regression and Random Forest models. This is achieved by generating multiple possible blend candidates for each input word pairing and evaluating them based on observable linguistic features. The success of this model architecture illustrates the potential usefulness of observable linguistic features for problems that elude more advanced models which utilize only features discovered in the latent space.

Exploring the impact of transliteration on NLP performance for low-resource languages: the case of Malese and Arabic

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Exploring the impact of transliteration on NLP performance for low-resource languages: the case of Malese and Arabic

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Back-transliteration of English loanwords in Japanese

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