A Multitask Learning Approach for Diacritic Restoration

Sawsan Alqahtani, Ajay Mishra, Mona Diab


Abstract
In many languages like Arabic, diacritics are used to specify pronunciations as well as meanings. Such diacritics are often omitted in written text, increasing the number of possible pronunciations and meanings for a word. This results in a more ambiguous text making computational processing on such text more difficult. Diacritic restoration is the task of restoring missing diacritics in the written text. Most state-of-the-art diacritic restoration models are built on character level information which helps generalize the model to unseen data, but presumably lose useful information at the word level. Thus, to compensate for this loss, we investigate the use of multi-task learning to jointly optimize diacritic restoration with related NLP problems namely word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic diacritization. We use Arabic as a case study since it has sufficient data resources for tasks that we consider in our joint modeling. Our joint models significantly outperform the baselines and are comparable to the state-of-the-art models that are more complex relying on morphological analyzers and/or a lot more data (e.g. dialectal data).
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.732
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8238–8247
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.732
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.732
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sawsan Alqahtani, Ajay Mishra, and Mona Diab. 2020. A Multitask Learning Approach for Diacritic Restoration. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 8238–8247, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Multitask Learning Approach for Diacritic Restoration (Alqahtani et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.732.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929167