A Deep Learning System for Automatic Extraction of Typological Linguistic Information from Descriptive Grammars

Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Daniel Foster, Azam Sheikh Muhammad, Raheela Saleem


Abstract
Linguistic typology is an area of linguistics concerned with analysis of and comparison between natural languages of the world based on their certain linguistic features. For that purpose, historically, the area has relied on manual extraction of linguistic feature values from textural descriptions of languages. This makes it a laborious and time expensive task and is also bound by human brain capacity. In this study, we present a deep learning system for the task of automatic extraction of linguistic features from textual descriptions of natural languages. First, textual descriptions are manually annotated with special structures called semantic frames. Those annotations are learned by a recurrent neural network, which is then used to annotate un-annotated text. Finally, the annotations are converted to linguistic feature values using a separate rule based module. Word embeddings, learned from general purpose text, are used as a major source of knowledge by the recurrent neural network. We compare the proposed deep learning system to a previously reported machine learning based system for the same task, and the deep learning system wins in terms of F1 scores with a fair margin. Such a system is expected to be a useful contribution for the automatic curation of typological databases, which otherwise are manually developed.
Anthology ID:
2021.ranlp-1.166
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)
Month:
September
Year:
2021
Address:
Held Online
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
1480–1489
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ranlp-1.166
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Daniel Foster, Azam Sheikh Muhammad, and Raheela Saleem. 2021. A Deep Learning System for Automatic Extraction of Typological Linguistic Information from Descriptive Grammars. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021), pages 1480–1489, Held Online. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
A Deep Learning System for Automatic Extraction of Typological Linguistic Information from Descriptive Grammars (Virk et al., RANLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ranlp-1.166.pdf
Data
FrameNet