Semi-supervised Thai Sentence Segmentation Using Local and Distant Word Representations

A sentence is typically treated as the minimal syntactic unit used to extract valuable information from long text. However, in written Thai, there are no explicit sentence markers. Some prior works use machine learning; however, a deep learning approach has never been employed. We propose a deep learning model for sentence segmentation that includes three main contributions. First, we integrate n-gram embedding as a local representation to capture word groups near sentence boundaries. Second, to focus on the keywords of dependent clauses, we combine the model with a distant representation obtained from self-attention modules. Finally, due to the scarcity of labeled data, for which annotation is difficult and time-consuming, we also investigate two techniques that allow us to utilize unlabeled data: Cross-View Training (CVT) as a semi-supervised learning technique, and a pre-trained language model (ELMo) to improve word representation. In the experiments, our model reduced the relative error by 7.4% and 18.5% compared with the baseline models on the Orchid and UGWC datasets, respectively. Ablation studies revealed that the main contributing factor was adopting n-gram features, which were further analyzed using the interpretation technique and indicated that the model utilizes the features in the same way that humans do

A GRU-based pipeline approach for word-sentence segmentation and punctuation restoration in English

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by IEEE in Proceedings of 2021 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP) on 20 Jan 2022. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1109/IALP54817.2021.9675269 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.In this study, we propose a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model to restore the following features: word and sentence boundaries, periods, commas, and capitalisation for unformatted English text. We approach feature restoration as a binary classification task where the model learns to predict whether a feature should be restored or not. A pipeline approach is proposed, in which only one feature (word boundary, sentence boundary, punctuation, capitalisation) is restored in each component of the pipeline model. To optimise the model, we conducted a grid search on the parameters. The effect of changing the order of the pipeline is also investigated experimentally; PERIODS > COMMAS > SPACES > CASING yielded the best result. Our findings highlight several specifcaction points with optimisation potential to be targeted in follow-up research

Leveraging writing systems changes for deep learning based Chinese affective analysis

Affective analysis of social media text is in great demand. Online text written in Chinese communities often contains mixed scripts including major text written in Chinese, an ideograph-based writing system, and minor text using Latin letters, an alphabet-based writing system. This phenomenon is referred to as writing systems changes (WSCs). Past studies have shown that WSCs often reflect unfiltered immediate affections. However, the use of WSCs poses more challenges in Natural Language Processing tasks because WSCs can break the syntax of the major text. In this work, we present our work to use WSCs as an effective feature in a hybrid deep learning model with attention network. The WSCs scripts are first identified by their encoding range. Then, the document representation of the text is learned through a Long Short-Term Memory model and the minor text is learned by a separate Convolution Neural Network model. To further highlight the WSCs components, an attention mechanism is adopted to re-weight the feature vector before the classification layer. Experiments show that the proposed hybrid deep learning method which better incorporates WSCs features can further improve performance compared to the state-of-the-art classification models. The experimental result indicates that WSCs can serve as effective information in affective analysis of the social media text

Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

A Comprehensive Survey on Word Representation Models: From Classical to State-Of-The-Art Word Representation Language Models

Word representation has always been an important research area in the history of natural language processing (NLP). Understanding such complex text data is imperative, given that it is rich in information and can be used widely across various applications. In this survey, we explore different word representation models and its power of expression, from the classical to modern-day state-of-the-art word representation language models (LMS). We describe a variety of text representation methods, and model designs have blossomed in the context of NLP, including SOTA LMs. These models can transform large volumes of text into effective vector representations capturing the same semantic information. Further, such representations can be utilized by various machine learning (ML) algorithms for a variety of NLP related tasks. In the end, this survey briefly discusses the commonly used ML and DL based classifiers, evaluation metrics and the applications of these word embeddings in different NLP tasks

Is text preprocessing still worth the time? A comparative survey on the influence of popular preprocessing methods on Transformers and traditional classifiers

With the advent of the modern pre-trained Transformers, the text preprocessing has started to be neglected and not specifically addressed in recent NLP literature. However, both from a linguistic and from a computer science point of view, we believe that even when using modern Transformers, text preprocessing can significantly impact on the performance of a classification model. We want to investigate and compare, through this study, how preprocessing impacts on the Text Classification (TC) performance of modern and traditional classification models. We report and discuss the preprocessing techniques found in the literature and their most recent variants or applications to address TC tasks in different domains. In order to assess how much the preprocessing affects classification performance, we apply the three top referenced preprocessing techniques (alone or in combination) to four publicly available datasets from different domains. Then, nine machine learning models – including modern Transformers – get the preprocessed text as input. The results presented show that an educated choice on the text preprocessing strategy to employ should be based on the task as well as on the model considered. Outcomes in this survey show that choosing the best preprocessing technique – in place of the worst – can significantly improve accuracy on the classification (up to 25%, as in the case of an XLNet on the IMDB dataset). In some cases, by means of a suitable preprocessing strategy, even a simple Naïve Bayes classifier proved to outperform (i.e., by 2% in accuracy) the best performing Transformer. We found that Transformers and traditional models exhibit a higher impact of the preprocessing on the TC performance. Our main findings are: (1) also on modern pre-trained language models, preprocessing can affect performance, depending on the datasets and on the preprocessing technique or combination of techniques used, (2) in some cases, using a proper preprocessing strategy, simple models can outperform Transformers on TC tasks, (3) similar classes of models exhibit similar level of sensitivity to text preprocessing