A Common Parts-of-Speech Tagset Framework for Indian Languages

Baskaran Sankaran, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Girish Nath Jha, S. Rajendran, K. Saravanan, L. Sobha, K.V. Subbarao


Abstract
We present a universal Parts-of-Speech (POS) tagset framework covering most of the Indian languages (ILs) following the hierarchical and decomposable tagset schema. In spite of significant number of speakers, there is no workable POS tagset and tagger for most ILs, which serve as fundamental building blocks for NLP research. Existing IL POS tagsets are often designed for a specific language; the few that have been designed for multiple languages cover only shallow linguistic features ignoring linguistic richness and the idiosyncrasies. The new framework that is proposed here addresses these deficiencies in an efficient and principled manner. We follow a hierarchical schema similar to that of EAGLES and this enables the framework to be flexible enough to capture rich features of a language/ language family, even while capturing the shared linguistic structures in a methodical way. The proposed common framework further facilitates the sharing and reusability of scarce resources in these languages and ensures cross-linguistic compatibility.
Anthology ID:
L08-1544
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
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Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/337_paper.pdf
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Cite (ACL):
Baskaran Sankaran, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Girish Nath Jha, S. Rajendran, K. Saravanan, L. Sobha, and K.V. Subbarao. 2008. A Common Parts-of-Speech Tagset Framework for Indian Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Common Parts-of-Speech Tagset Framework for Indian Languages (Sankaran et al., LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/337_paper.pdf