Transliteration Better than Translation? Answering Code-mixed Questions over a Knowledge Base

Vishal Gupta, Manoj Chinnakotla, Manish Shrivastava


Abstract
Humans can learn multiple languages. If they know a fact in one language, they can answer a question in another language they understand. They can also answer Code-mix (CM) questions: questions which contain both languages. This behavior is attributed to the unique learning ability of humans. Our task aims to study if machines can achieve this. We demonstrate how effectively a machine can answer CM questions. In this work, we adopt a two phase approach: candidate generation and candidate re-ranking to answer questions. We propose a Triplet-Siamese-Hybrid CNN (TSHCNN) to re-rank candidate answers. We show experiments on the SimpleQuestions dataset. Our network is trained only on English questions provided in this dataset and noisy Hindi translations of these questions and can answer English-Hindi CM questions effectively without the need of translation into English. Back-transliterated CM questions outperform their lexical and sentence level translated counterparts by 5% & 35% in accuracy respectively, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in a resource constrained setting.
Anthology ID:
W18-3205
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Gustavo Aguilar, Fahad AlGhamdi, Victor Soto, Thamar Solorio, Mona Diab, Julia Hirschberg
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
39–50
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-3205
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-3205
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vishal Gupta, Manoj Chinnakotla, and Manish Shrivastava. 2018. Transliteration Better than Translation? Answering Code-mixed Questions over a Knowledge Base. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching, pages 39–50, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transliteration Better than Translation? Answering Code-mixed Questions over a Knowledge Base (Gupta et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-3205.pdf
Data
SimpleQuestions