Multilingual Speech Recognition With A Single End-To-End Model

Training a conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to support multiple languages is challenging because the sub-word unit, lexicon and word inventories are typically language specific. In contrast, sequence-to-sequence models are well suited for multilingual ASR because they encapsulate an acoustic, pronunciation and language model jointly in a single network. In this work we present a single sequence-to-sequence ASR model trained on 9 different Indian languages, which have very little overlap in their scripts. Specifically, we take a union of language-specific grapheme sets and train a grapheme-based sequence-to-sequence model jointly on data from all languages. We find that this model, which is not explicitly given any information about language identity, improves recognition performance by 21% relative compared to analogous sequence-to-sequence models trained on each language individually. By modifying the model to accept a language identifier as an additional input feature, we further improve performance by an additional 7% relative and eliminate confusion between different languages.Comment: Accepted in ICASSP 201

Automatic processing of code-mixed social media content

Code-mixing or language-mixing is a linguistic phenomenon where multiple language mix together during conversation. Standard natural language processing (NLP) tools such as part-of-speech (POS) tagger and parsers perform poorly because such tools are generally trained with monolingual content. Thus there is a need for code-mixed NLP. This research focuses on creating a code-mixed corpus in English-Hindi-Bengali and using it to develop a world-level language identifier and a POS tagger for such code-mixed content. The first target of this research is word-level language identification. A data set of romanised and code-mixed content written in English, Hindi and Bengali was created and annotated. Word-level language identification (LID) was performed on this data using dictionaries and machine learn- ing techniques. We find that among a dictionary-based system, a character-n-gram based linear model, a character-n-gram based first order Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and a recurrent neural network in the form of a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) that consider words as well as characters, LSTM outperformed the other methods. We also took part in the First Workshop of Computational Approaches to Code-Switching, EMNLP, 2014 where we achieved the highest token-level accuracy in the word-level language identification task of Nepali-English. The second target of this research is part-of-speech (POS) tagging. POS tagging methods for code- mixed data (e.g. pipeline and stacked systems and LSTM-based neural models) have been implemented, among them, neural approach outperformed the other approach. Further, we investigate building a joint model to perform language identification and POS tagging jointly. We compare between a factorial CRF (FCRF) based joint model and three LSTM-based multi-task models for word-level language identification and POS tagging. The neural models achieve good accuracy in language identification and POS tagging by outperforming the FCRF approach. Further- more, we found that it is better to go for a multi-task learning approach than to perform individual task (e.g. language identification and POS tagging) using neural approach. Comparison between the three neural approaches revealed that without using task-specific recurrent layers, it is possible to achieve good accuracy by careful handling of output layers for these two tasks e.g. LID and POS tagging

A Comprehensive Review of Sentiment Analysis on Indian Regional Languages: Techniques, Challenges, and Trends

Sentiment analysis (SA) is the process of understanding emotion within a text. It helps identify the opinion, attitude, and tone of a text categorizing it into positive, negative, or neutral. SA is frequently used today as more and more people get a chance to put out their thoughts due to the advent of social media. Sentiment analysis benefits industries around the globe, like finance, advertising, marketing, travel, hospitality, etc. Although the majority of work done in this field is on global languages like English, in recent years, the importance of SA in local languages has also been widely recognized. This has led to considerable research in the analysis of Indian regional languages. This paper comprehensively reviews SA in the following major Indian Regional languages: Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, and Urdu. Furthermore, this paper presents techniques, challenges, findings, recent research trends, and future scope for enhancing results accuracy

Identification of monolingual and code-switch information from English-Kannada code-switch data

Code-switching is a very common occurrence in social media communication, predominantly found in multilingual countries like India. Using more than one language in communication is known as code-switching or code-mixing. Some of the important applications of code-switch are machine translation (MT), shallow parsing, dialog systems, and semantic parsing. Identifying code-switch and monolingual information is useful for better communication in online networking websites. In this paper, we performed a character level n-gram approach to identify monolingual and code-switch information from English-Kannada social media data. We paralleled various machine learning techniques such as naïve Bayes (NB), support vector classifier (SVC), logistic regression (LR) and neural network (NN) on English-Kannada code-switch (EKCS) data. From the proposed approach, it is observed that the character level n-gram approach provides 1.8% to 4.1% of improvement in terms of Accuracy and 1.6% to 3.8% of improvement in F1-score. Also observed that SVC and NN techniques are outperformed in terms of accuracy (97.9%) and F1-score (98%) with character level n-gram