Part-of-speech Tagging for Extremely Low-resource Indian Languages

Sanjeev Kumar, Preethi Jyothi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Modern natural language processing (NLP) systems thrive when given access to large datasets. However, a large fraction of the world’s languages are not privy to such benefits due to sparse documentation and inadequate digital representation. This is especially true for Indian regional languages. As a first step towards expanding the reach of NLP technologies to extremely low-resource Indian languages, we present a new parallel part-of-speech (POS) evaluation dataset for Angika, Magahi, Bhojpuri and Hindi. Angika, Magahi, Bhojpuri, along with the more well-known Hindi, are all languages spoken in the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Ours is notably the first NLP resource, even for a shallow NLP task like POS-tagging, for Angika. We establish POS-tagging baselines using state-of-the-art multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) finetuned on Hindi data, and show zero-shot evaluations on the other three languages. While all four languages use the same Devanagari script, pretrained tokenizers underperform in zero-shot on the three languages. We propose a simple look-back fix to address the tokenization challenge yielding F1-score improvements of up to 8% on Angika and show how it comes very close to an oracle setting when the underlying Hindi word is known (and can be accurately tokenized).
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.857
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14422–14431
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.857
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanjeev Kumar, Preethi Jyothi, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2024. Part-of-speech Tagging for Extremely Low-resource Indian Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 14422–14431, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Part-of-speech Tagging for Extremely Low-resource Indian Languages (Kumar et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.857.pdf