Data augmentation techniques have been widely used to improve machine learning performance as they facilitate generalization. In this work, we propose a novel augmentation method to generate high quality synthetic data for low-resource tagging tasks with language models trained on the linearized labeled sentences. Our method is applicable to both supervised and semi-supervised settings. For the supervised settings, we conduct extensive experiments on named entity recognition (NER), part of speech (POS) tagging and end-to-end target based sentiment analysis (E2E-TBSA) tasks. For the semi-supervised settings, we evaluate our method on the NER task under the conditions of given unlabeled data only and unlabeled data plus a knowledge base. The results show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines, particularly when the given gold training data are less.

Exploiting sentence-level labels, which are easy to obtain, is one of the plausible methods to improve low-resource named entity recognition (NER), where token-level labels are costly to annotate. Current models for jointly learning sentence and token labeling are limited to binary classification. We present a joint model that supports multi-class classification and introduce a simple variant of self-attention that allows the model to learn scaling factors. Our model produces 3.78%, 4.20%, 2.08% improvements in F1 over the BiLSTM-CRF baseline on e-commerce product titles in three different low-resource languages: Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian, respectively.

We show that sampling latent variables multiple times at a gradient step helps in improving a variational autoencoder and propose a simple and effective method to better exploit these latent variables through hidden state averaging. Consistent gains in performance on two different datasets, Penn Treebank and Yahoo, indicate the generalizability of our method.

Flipping sentiment while preserving sentence meaning is challenging because parallel sentences with the same content but different sentiment polarities are not always available for model learning. We introduce a method for acquiring imperfectly aligned sentences from non-parallel corpora and propose a model that learns to minimize the sentiment and content losses in a fully end-to-end manner. Our model is simple and offers well-balanced results across two domains: Yelp restaurant and Amazon product reviews.

In Chinese texts, words composed of single or multiple characters are not separated by spaces, unlike most western languages. Therefore Chinese word segmentation is considered an important first step in machine translation (MT) and its performance impacts MT results. Many factors affect Chinese word segmentations, including the segmentation standards and segmentation strategies. The performance of a corpus-based word segmentation model depends heavily on the quality and the segmentation standard of the training corpora. However, we observed that existing manually annotated Chinese corpora tend to have low segmentation granularity and provide poor morphological information due to the present segmentation standards. In this paper, we introduce a short-unit standard of Chinese word segmentation, which is particularly suitable for machine translation, and propose a semi-automatic method of transforming the existing corpora into the ones that can satisfy our standards. We evaluate the usefulness of our approach on the basis of translation tasks from the technology newswire domain and the scientific paper domain, and demonstrate that it significantly improves the performance of Chinese-Japanese machine translation (over 1.0 BLEU increase).

This paper presents a framework for Thai morphological analysis based on the theoretical background of conditional random fields. We formulate morphological analysis of an unsegmented language as the sequential supervised learning problem. Given a sequence of characters, all possibilities of word/tag segmentation are generated, and then the optimal path is selected with some criterion. We examine two different techniques, including the Viterbi score and the confidence estimation. Preliminary results are given to show the feasibility of our proposed framework.

The growing of multilingual information processing technology has created the need of linguistic resources, especially lexical database. Many attempts were put to alter the traditional dictionary to computational dictionary, or widely named as computational lexicon. TCL’s Computational Lexicon (TCLLEX) is a recent development of a large-scale Thai Lexicon, which aims to serve as a fundamental linguistic resource for natural language processing research. We design either terminology or ontology for structuring the lexicon based on the idea of computability and reusability.