Named Entity Recognition for Nepali Text Using Support Vector Machines

Abstract Named Entity Recognition aims to identify and to classify rigid designators in text such as proper names, biological species, and temporal expressions into some predefined categories. There has been growing interest in this field of research since the early 1990s. Named Entity Recognition has a vital role in different fields of natural language processing such as Machine Translation, Information Extraction, Question Answering System and various other fields. In this paper, Named Entity Recognition for Nepali text, based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is presented which is one of machine learning approaches for the classification task. A set of features are extracted from training data set. Accuracy and efficiency of SVM classifier are analyzed in three different sizes of training data set. Recognition systems are tested with ten datasets for Nepali text. The strength of this work is the efficient feature extraction and the comprehensive recognition techniques. The Support Vector Machine based Named Entity Recognition is limited to use a certain set of features and it uses a small dictionary which affects its performance. The learning performance of recognition system is observed. It is found that system can learn well from the small set of training data and increase the rate of learning on the increment of training size

NepBERTa : Nepali Language Model Trained in a Large Corpus

We would like to thank Google’s TPU Research Cloud program for providing us with free and unlimited usage of TPU v3-128 for 90 days. It would not have been possible without the continuous support and response of the TRC team.Publisher PD

Understanding parents and professionals knowledge and awareness of autism in Nepal

Autism is a global phenomenon. Yet, there is a dearth of knowledge of how it is understood and its impact in low-income countries. We examined parents’ and professionals’ understanding of autism in one low-income country, Nepal. We conducted focus groups and semi-structured interviews with parents of autistic and non-autistic children and education and health professionals from urban and rural settings (n = 106), asking questions about typical and atypical development and presenting vignettes of children to prompt discussion. Overall, parents of typically developing children and professionals had little explicit awareness of autism. They did, however, use some distinctive terms to describe children with autism from children with other developmental conditions. Furthermore, most participants felt that environmental factors, including in-utero stressors and birth complications, parenting style and home or school environment were key causes of atypical child development and further called for greater efforts to raise awareness and build community capacity to address autism. This is the first study to show the striking lack of awareness of autism by parents and professionals alike. These results have important implications for future work in Nepal aiming both to estimate the prevalence of autism and to enhance support available for autistic children and their families

TriggerCit: Early Flood Alerting using Twitter and Geolocation - A Comparison with Alternative Sources

Rapid impact assessment in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster is essential to provide adequate information to international organisations, local authorities, and first responders. Social media can support emergency response with evidence-based content posted by citizens and organisations during ongoing events. In the paper, we propose TriggerCit: an early flood alerting tool with a multilanguage approach focused on timeliness and geolocation. The paper focuses on assessing the reliability of the approach as a triggering system, comparing it with alternative sources for alerts, and evaluating the quality and amount of complementary information gathered. Geolocated visual evidence extracted from Twitter by TriggerCit was analysed in two case studies on floods in Thailand and Nepal in 2021.Comment: 12 pages Keywords Social Media, Disaster management, Early Alertin

Satellite Workshop On Language, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science for Natural Language Processing Applications (LAICS-NLP): Discovery of Meaning from Text

This paper proposes a novel method to disambiguate important words from a collection of documents. The hypothesis that underlies this approach is that there is a minimal set of senses that are significant in characterizing a context. We extend Yarowsky’s one sense per discourse [13] further to a collection of related documents rather than a single document. We perform distributed clustering on a set of features representing each of the top ten categories of documents in the Reuters-21578 dataset. Groups of terms that have a similar term distributional pattern across documents were identified. WordNet-based similarity measurement was then computed for terms within each cluster. An aggregation of the associations in WordNet that was employed to ascertain term similarity within clusters has provided a means of identifying clusters’ root senses

Challenging the state by reproducing its principles. The demand for “Gorkhaland” between regional autonomy and the national belonging

Contrary to assumptions about the dualist relationship between region and nation, I propose to understand both as simultaneously emerging. An analysis of the rhetoric of the “Gorkhaland” movement that demands a separate union state in India to be carved out of West Bengal demonstrates that although the movement challenges the distribution of power over territory, it does so by using a “pan-Indian grammar,” to borrow Baruah’s terminology. This is reflected in imaginative geographies that endow the demanded territory with meaning and render it an ethno-scape, while at the same time presenting it as a viable part of an imagined Indian nation. The Gorkhas attempt to bridge the gap between the “national” and the “regional” and challenge dominant identity ascriptions. In doing so, they stress their multiple belongings and affiliations. In this process the Indian nation is produced at various levels of society