Dependency Parsing in a Morphological rich language, Tamil

Vijay Sundar Ram, Sobha Lalitha Devi


Abstract
Dependency parsing is the process of analysing the grammatical structure of a sentence based on the dependencies between the words in a sentence. The annotation of dependency parsing is done using different formalisms at word-level namely Universal Dependencies and chunk-level namely AnnaCorra. Though dependency parsing is deeply dealt in languages such as English, Czech etc the same cannot be adopted for the morphologically rich and agglutinative languages. In this paper, we discuss the development of a dependency parser for Tamil, a South Dravidian language. The different characteristics of the language make this task a challenging task. Tamil, a morphologically rich and agglutinative language, has copula drop, accusative and genitive case drop and pro-drop. Coordinative constructions are introduced by affixation of morpheme ‘um’. Embedded clausal structures are common in relative participle and complementizer clauses. In this paper, we have discussed our approach to handle some of these challenges. We have used Malt parser, a supervised learning- approach based implementation. We have obtained an accuracy of 79.27% for Unlabelled Attachment Score, 73.64% for Labelled Attachment Score and 68.82% for Labelled Accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2021.pail-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Parsing and its Applications for Indian Languages
Month:
December
Year:
2021
Address:
NIT Silchar, India
Editors:
Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran, Parameswari Krishnamurthy, Pruthwik Mishra
Venue:
PAIL
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
20–26
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.pail-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vijay Sundar Ram and Sobha Lalitha Devi. 2021. Dependency Parsing in a Morphological rich language, Tamil. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Parsing and its Applications for Indian Languages, pages 20–26, NIT Silchar, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
Dependency Parsing in a Morphological rich language, Tamil (Sundar Ram & Lalitha Devi, PAIL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.pail-1.3.pdf