Isolating the Effects of Modeling Recursive Structures: A Case Study in Pronunciation Prediction of Chinese Characters

Minh Nguyen, Gia H Ngo, Nancy Chen


Abstract
Finding that explicitly modeling structures leads to better generalization, we consider the task of predicting Cantonese pronunciations of logographs (Chinese characters) using logographs’ recursive structures. This task is a suitable case study for two reasons. First, logographs’ pronunciations depend on structures (i.e. the hierarchies of sub-units in logographs) Second, the quality of logographic structures is consistent since the structures are constructed automatically using a set of rules. Thus, this task is less affected by confounds such as varying quality between annotators. Empirical results show that modeling structures explicitly using treeLSTM outperforms LSTM baseline, reducing prediction error by 6.0% relative.
Anthology ID:
W19-3631
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Amittai Axelrod, Diyi Yang, Rossana Cunha, Samira Shaikh, Zeerak Waseem
Venue:
WiNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
95–97
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3631
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minh Nguyen, Gia H Ngo, and Nancy Chen. 2019. Isolating the Effects of Modeling Recursive Structures: A Case Study in Pronunciation Prediction of Chinese Characters. In Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP, pages 95–97, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Isolating the Effects of Modeling Recursive Structures: A Case Study in Pronunciation Prediction of Chinese Characters (Nguyen et al., WiNLP 2019)
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