A Robust Transformation-Based Learning Approach Using Ripple Down Rules for Part-of-Speech Tagging

In this paper, we propose a new approach to construct a system of transformation rules for the Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging task. Our approach is based on an incremental knowledge acquisition method where rules are stored in an exception structure and new rules are only added to correct the errors of existing rules; thus allowing systematic control of the interaction between the rules. Experimental results on 13 languages show that our approach is fast in terms of training time and tagging speed. Furthermore, our approach obtains very competitive accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art POS and morphological taggers.Comment: Version 1: 13 pages. Version 2: Submitted to AI Communications - the European Journal on Artificial Intelligence. Version 3: Resubmitted after major revisions. Version 4: Resubmitted after minor revisions. Version 5: to appear in AI Communications (accepted for publication on 3/12/2015

UniBA @ KIPoS: A Hybrid Approach for Part-of-Speech Tagging

The Part of Speech tagging operation is becoming increasingly important as it represents the starting point for other high-level operations such as Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Parsing and Information Retrieval. Although the accuracy of state-of-the-art POS-taggers reach a high level of accuracy (around 96-97%) it cannot yet be considered a solved problem because there are many variables to take into account. For example, most of these systems use lexical knowledge to assign a tag to unknown words. The task solution proposed in this work is based on a hybrid tagger, which doesn’t use any prior lexical knowledge, consisting of two different types of POS-taggers used sequentially: HMM tagger and RDRPOSTagger [(Nguyen et al., 2014), (Nguyen et al., 2016)]. We trained the hybrid model using the Development set and the combination of Development and Silver sets. The results have shown an accuracy of 0,8114 and 0,8100 respectively for the main task.L’operazione di Part of Speech tagging sta diventando sempre più importante in quanto rappresenta il punto di partenza per altre operazioni di alto livello come Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Parsing e Information Retrieval. Sebbene l’accuratezza dei POS tagger allo stato dell’arte raggiunga un alto livello di accuratezza (intorno al 96-97%), esso non può ancora essere considerato un problema risolto perché ci sono molte variabili da tenere in considerazione. Ad esempio, la maggior parte di questi sistemi utilizza della conoscenza linguistica per assegnare un tag alle parole sconosciute. La soluzione proposta in questo lavoro si basa su un tagger ibrido, che non utilizza alcuna conoscenza linguistica pregressa, costituito da due diversi tipi di POS-tagger usati in sequenza: HMM tagger e RDRPOSTagger [(Nguyen et al., 2014), (Nguyen et al., 2016)]. Abbiamo addestrato il modello ibrido utilizzando il Development Set e la combinazione di Silver e Development Sets. I risultati hanno mostrato un’accuratezza pari a 0,8114 e 0,8100 rispettivamente per il task main

Speaker Dependent Voice Recognition with Word-Tense Association and Part-of-Speech Tagging

Extensive Research has been conducted on speech recognition and Speaker Recognition over the past few decades. Speaker recognition deals with identifying the speaker from multiple speakers and the ability to filter out the voice of an individual from the background for computational understanding. The more commonly researched method, speech recognition, deals only with computational linguistics. This thesis deals with speaker recognition and natural language processing. The most common speaker recognition systems are Text-Dependent and identify the speaker after a key word/phrase is uttered. This thesis presents Text-Independent Speaker recognition systems that incorporate the collaborative effort and research of noise-filtering, Speech Segmentation, Feature extraction, speaker verification and finally, Partial Language Modelling. The filtering process was accomplished using 4th order Butterworth Band-pass filters to dampen ambient noise outside normal speech frequencies of 300Hzto3000Hz. Speech segmentation utilizes Hamming windows to segment the speech, after which speech detection occurs by calculating the Short time Energy and Zero-crossing rates over a particular time period and identifying voiced from unvoiced using a threshold. Audio data collected from different people is run consecutively through a Speaker Training and Recognition Algorithm which uses neural networks to create a training group and target group for the recognition process. The output of the segmentation module is then processed by the neural network to recognize the speaker. Though not implemented here due to database and computational requirements, the last module suggests a new model for the Part of Speech tagging process that involves a combination of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Hidden Markov Models (HMM) in a series configuration to achieve higher accuracy. This differs from existing research by diverging from the usual single model approach or the creation of hybrid ANN and HMM models

Ripple-down rules based open information extraction for the web documents

The World Wide Web contains a massive amount of information in unstructured natural language and obtaining valuable information from informally written Web documents is a major research challenge. One research focus is Open Information Extraction (OIE) aimed at developing relation-independent information extraction. Open Information Extraction systems seek to extract all potential relations from the text rather than extracting few pre-defined relations. Previous machine learning-based Open Information Extraction systems require large volumes of labelled training examples and have trouble handling NLP tools errors caused by Web s informality. These systems used self-supervised learning that generates a labelled training dataset automatically using NLP tools with some heuristic rules. As the number of NLP tool errors increase because of the Web s informality, the self-supervised learning-based labelling technique produces noisy label and critical extraction errors. This thesis presents Ripple-Down Rules based Open Information Extraction (RDROIE) an approach to Open Information Extraction that uses Ripple-Down Rules (RDR) incremental learning technique. The key advantages of this approach are that it does not require labelled training dataset and can handle the freer writing style that occurs in Web documents and can correct errors introduced by NLP tools. The RDROIE system, with minimal low-cost rule addition, outperformed previous OIE systems on informal Web documents

Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

A usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) posits that slot-constraints generalize from common exemplar constructions. But what is the best model of constraint generalization? This paper evaluates competing frequency-based and association-based models across eight languages using a metric derived from the Minimum Description Length paradigm. The experiments show that association-based models produce better generalizations across all languages by a significant margin

Survey on Thai NLP Language Resources and Tools

Over the past decades, Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been expanding to cover more languages. Recently particularly, NLP community has paid increasing attention to under-resourced languages. However, there are still many languages for which NLP research is limited in terms of both language resources and software tools. Thai language is one of the under-resourced languages in the NLP domain, although it is spoken by nearly 70 million people globally. In this paper, we report on our survey on the past development of Thai NLP research to help understand its current state and future research directions. Our survey shows that, although Thai NLP community has achieved a significant achievement over the past three decades, particularly on NLP upstream tasks such as tokenisation, research on downstream tasks such as syntactic parsing and semantic analysis is still limited. But we foresee that Thai NLP research will advance rapidly as richer Thai language resources and more robust NLP techniques become available