Challenging Language-Dependent Segmentation for Arabic: An Application to Machine Translation and Part-of-Speech Tagging

Hassan Sajjad, Fahim Dalvi, Nadir Durrani, Ahmed Abdelali, Yonatan Belinkov, Stephan Vogel


Abstract
Word segmentation plays a pivotal role in improving any Arabic NLP application. Therefore, a lot of research has been spent in improving its accuracy. Off-the-shelf tools, however, are: i) complicated to use and ii) domain/dialect dependent. We explore three language-independent alternatives to morphological segmentation using: i) data-driven sub-word units, ii) characters as a unit of learning, and iii) word embeddings learned using a character CNN (Convolution Neural Network). On the tasks of Machine Translation and POS tagging, we found these methods to achieve close to, and occasionally surpass state-of-the-art performance. In our analysis, we show that a neural machine translation system is sensitive to the ratio of source and target tokens, and a ratio close to 1 or greater, gives optimal performance.
Anthology ID:
P17-2095
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
601–607
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2095
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-2095
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hassan Sajjad, Fahim Dalvi, Nadir Durrani, Ahmed Abdelali, Yonatan Belinkov, and Stephan Vogel. 2017. Challenging Language-Dependent Segmentation for Arabic: An Application to Machine Translation and Part-of-Speech Tagging. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 601–607, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Challenging Language-Dependent Segmentation for Arabic: An Application to Machine Translation and Part-of-Speech Tagging (Sajjad et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2095.pdf