958 research outputs found
Modelling the Lexicon in Unsupervised Part of Speech Induction
Automatically inducing the syntactic part-of-speech categories for words in
text is a fundamental task in Computational Linguistics. While the performance
of unsupervised tagging models has been slowly improving, current
state-of-the-art systems make the obviously incorrect assumption that all
tokens of a given word type must share a single part-of-speech tag. This
one-tag-per-type heuristic counters the tendency of Hidden Markov Model based
taggers to over generate tags for a given word type. However, it is clearly
incompatible with basic syntactic theory. In this paper we extend a
state-of-the-art Pitman-Yor Hidden Markov Model tagger with an explicit model
of the lexicon. In doing so we are able to incorporate a soft bias towards
inducing few tags per type. We develop a particle filter for drawing samples
from the posterior of our model and present empirical results that show that
our model is competitive with and faster than the state-of-the-art without
making any unrealistic restrictions.Comment: To be presented at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistic
Methods for Amharic part-of-speech tagging
The paper describes a set of experiments
involving the application of three state-of-
the-art part-of-speech taggers to Ethiopian
Amharic, using three different tagsets.
The taggers showed worse performance
than previously reported results for Eng-
lish, in particular having problems with
unknown words. The best results were
obtained using a Maximum Entropy ap-
proach, while HMM-based and SVM-
based taggers got comparable results
Syntactic Topic Models
The syntactic topic model (STM) is a Bayesian nonparametric model of language
that discovers latent distributions of words (topics) that are both
semantically and syntactically coherent. The STM models dependency parsed
corpora where sentences are grouped into documents. It assumes that each word
is drawn from a latent topic chosen by combining document-level features and
the local syntactic context. Each document has a distribution over latent
topics, as in topic models, which provides the semantic consistency. Each
element in the dependency parse tree also has a distribution over the topics of
its children, as in latent-state syntax models, which provides the syntactic
consistency. These distributions are convolved so that the topic of each word
is likely under both its document and syntactic context. We derive a fast
posterior inference algorithm based on variational methods. We report
qualitative and quantitative studies on both synthetic data and hand-parsed
documents. We show that the STM is a more predictive model of language than
current models based only on syntax or only on topics
Basic tasks of sentiment analysis
Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective
sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment.
So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the
objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In
subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple
topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in
identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the
specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising
or complaining about
Practical Natural Language Processing for Low-Resource Languages.
As the Internet and World Wide Web have continued to gain widespread adoption, the linguistic diversity represented has also been growing. Simultaneously the field of Linguistics is facing a crisis of the opposite sort. Languages are becoming extinct faster than ever before and linguists now estimate that the world could lose more than half of its linguistic diversity by the year 2100. This is a special time for Computational Linguistics; this field has unprecedented access to a great number of low-resource languages, readily available to be studied, but needs to act quickly before political, social, and economic pressures cause these languages to disappear from the Web.
Most work in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on English or other languages that have text corpora of hundreds of millions of words. In this work, we present methods for automatically building NLP tools for low-resource languages with minimal need for human annotation in these languages. We start first with language identification, specifically focusing on word-level language identification, an understudied variant that is necessary for processing Web text and develop highly accurate machine learning methods for this problem. From there we move onto the problems of part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing. With both of these problems we extend the current state of the art in projected learning to make use of multiple high-resource source languages instead of just a single language. In both tasks, we are able to improve on the best current methods. All of these tools are practically realized in the "Minority Language Server," an online tool that brings these techniques together with low-resource language text on the Web. The Minority Language Server, starting with only a few words in a language can automatically collect text in a language, identify its language and tag its parts of speech. We hope that this system is able to provide a convincing proof of concept for the automatic collection and processing of low-resource language text from the Web, and one that can hopefully be realized before it is too late.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113373/1/benking_1.pd
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