ThamizhiUDp: A Dependency Parser for Tamil

Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran, Gihan Dias


Abstract
This paper describes how we developed a neural-based dependency parser, namely ThamizhiUDp, which provides a complete pipeline for the dependency parsing of the Tamil language text using Universal Dependency formalism. We have considered the phases of the dependency parsing pipeline and identified tools and resources in each of these phases to improve the accuracy and to tackle data scarcity. ThamizhiUDp uses Stanza for tokenisation and lemmatisation, ThamizhiPOSt and ThamizhiMorph for generating Part of Speech (POS) and Morphological annotations, and uuparser with multilingual training for dependency parsing. ThamizhiPOSt is our POS tagger, which is based on the Stanza, trained with Amrita POS-tagged corpus. It is the current state-of-the-art in Tamil POS tagging with an F1 score of 93.27. Our morphological analyzer, ThamizhiMorph is a rule-based system with a very good coverage of Tamil. Our dependency parser ThamizhiUDp was trained using multilingual data. It shows a Labelled Assigned Score (LAS) of 62.39, 4 points higher than the current best achieved for Tamil dependency parsing. Therefore, we show that breaking up the dependency parsing pipeline to accommodate existing tools and resources is a viable approach for low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2020.icon-main.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India
Editors:
Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Dipti Misra Sharma, Rajeev Sangal
Venue:
ICON
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
200–207
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.icon-main.26
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran and Gihan Dias. 2020. ThamizhiUDp: A Dependency Parser for Tamil. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 200–207, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
ThamizhiUDp: A Dependency Parser for Tamil (Sarveswaran & Dias, ICON 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.icon-main.26.pdf
Code
 sarves/thamizhi-pos +  additional community code
Data
Universal Dependencies