876 research outputs found
Data Cleaning for XML Electronic Dictionaries via Statistical Anomaly Detection
Many important forms of data are stored digitally in XML format. Errors can
occur in the textual content of the data in the fields of the XML. Fixing these
errors manually is time-consuming and expensive, especially for large amounts
of data. There is increasing interest in the research, development, and use of
automated techniques for assisting with data cleaning. Electronic dictionaries
are an important form of data frequently stored in XML format that frequently
have errors introduced through a mixture of manual typographical entry errors
and optical character recognition errors. In this paper we describe methods for
flagging statistical anomalies as likely errors in electronic dictionaries
stored in XML format. We describe six systems based on different sources of
information. The systems detect errors using various signals in the data
including uncommon characters, text length, character-based language models,
word-based language models, tied-field length ratios, and tied-field
transliteration models. Four of the systems detect errors based on expectations
automatically inferred from content within elements of a single field type. We
call these single-field systems. Two of the systems detect errors based on
correspondence expectations automatically inferred from content within elements
of multiple related field types. We call these tied-field systems. For each
system, we provide an intuitive analysis of the type of error that it is
successful at detecting. Finally, we describe two larger-scale evaluations
using crowdsourcing with Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform and using the
annotations of a domain expert. The evaluations consistently show that the
systems are useful for improving the efficiency with which errors in XML
electronic dictionaries can be detected.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables; published in Proceedings of the 2016
IEEE Tenth International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), Laguna
Hills, CA, USA, pages 79-86, February 201
Character-level and syntax-level models for low-resource and multilingual natural language processing
There are more than 7000 languages in the world, but only a small portion of them benefit from Natural Language Processing resources and models. Although languages generally present different characteristics, “cross-lingual bridges” can be exploited, such as transliteration signals and word alignment links. Such information, together with the availability of multiparallel corpora and the urge to overcome language barriers, motivates us to build models that represent more of the world’s languages.
This thesis investigates cross-lingual links for improving the processing of low-resource languages with language-agnostic models at the character and syntax level. Specifically, we propose to (i) use orthographic similarities and transliteration between Named Entities and rare words in different languages to improve the construction of Bilingual Word Embeddings (BWEs) and named entity resources, and (ii) exploit multiparallel corpora for projecting labels from high- to low-resource languages, thereby gaining access to weakly supervised processing methods for the latter.
In the first publication, we describe our approach for improving the translation of rare words and named entities for the Bilingual Dictionary Induction (BDI) task, using orthography and transliteration information. In our second work, we tackle BDI by enriching BWEs with orthography embeddings and a number of other features, using our classification-based system to overcome script differences among languages. The third publication describes cheap cross-lingual signals that should be considered when building mapping approaches for BWEs since they are simple to extract, effective for bootstrapping the mapping of BWEs, and overcome the failure of unsupervised methods. The fourth paper shows our approach for extracting a named entity resource for 1340 languages, including very low-resource languages from all major areas of linguistic diversity. We exploit parallel corpus statistics and transliteration models and obtain improved performance over prior work. Lastly, the fifth work models annotation projection as a graph-based label propagation problem for the part of speech tagging task. Part of speech models trained on our labeled sets outperform prior work for low-resource languages like Bambara (an African language spoken in Mali), Erzya (a Uralic language spoken in Russia’s Republic of Mordovia), Manx (the Celtic language of the Isle of Man), and Yoruba (a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria and surrounding countries)
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