Malaysian English is a low resource creole languages, where it carries the elements of Malay, Chinese, and Tamil languages, in addition to Standard English. Named Entity Recognition (NER) models underperforms when capturing entities from Malaysian English text due to its distinctive morphosyntactic adaptations, semantic features and code-switching (mixing English and Malay). Considering these gaps, we introduce MENmBERT and MENBERT, a pre-trained language model with contextual understanding, specifically tailored for Malaysian English. We have fine-tuned MENmBERT and MENBERT using manually annotated entities and relations from the Malaysian English News Article (MEN) Dataset. This fine-tuning process allows the PLM to learn representations that capture the nuances of Malaysian English relevant for NER and RE tasks. MENmBERT achieved a 1.52% and 26.27% improvement on NER and RE tasks respectively compared to the bert-base-multilingual-cased model. While the overall performance for NER does not have significant improvement, our further analysis shows that there is a significant improvement when evaluated by the 12 entity labels. These findings suggest that pre-training language models on language-specific and geographically-focused corpora can be a promising approach for improving NER performance in low-resource settings. The dataset and code published through this paper provide valuable resources for NLP research work focusing on Malaysian English.

Standard English and Malaysian English exhibit notable differences, posing challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks on Malaysian English. An experiment using state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) solutions in Malaysian English news articles highlights that they cannot handle morphosyntactic variations in Malaysian English. Unfortunately, most of the existing datasets are mainly based on Standard English, which is not sufficient to enhance NLP tasks in Malaysian English. To the best of our knowledge, there is no annotated dataset that can be used to improve the model. To address this issue, we have constructed a Malaysian English News (MEN) dataset, which contains 200 news articles that are manually annotated with entities and relations. We then fine-tuned the spaCy NER tool and validated that having a dataset tailor-made for Malaysian English could significantly improve the performance of NER in Malaysian English. This paper presents our efforts to acquire data, the annotation methodology, and a detailed analysis of the annotated dataset. To ensure the quality of the annotation, we have measured the Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA), and any disagreements were resolved by a subject matter expert through adjudication. After a rigorous quality check, we have developed a dataset with 6,061 entities and 3,268 relation instances. Finally, we discuss spaCy fine-tuning setup and analysis of NER performance. This unique dataset will contribute significantly to the advancement of NLP research in Malaysian English, allowing researchers to accelerate their progress, particularly in NER and relation extraction.