In natural language processing (NLP), code-mixing (CM) is a challenging task, especially when the mixed languages include dialects. In Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Hokkien-Mandarin is the most widespread code-mixed language pair among Chinese immigrants, and it is also common in Taiwan. However, dialects such as Hokkien often have a scarcity of resources and the lack of an official writing system, limiting the development of dialect CM research. In this paper, we propose a method to construct a Hokkien-Mandarin CM dataset to mitigate the limitation, overcome the morphological issue under the Sino-Tibetan language family, and offer an efficient Hokkien word segmentation method through a linguistics-based toolkit. Furthermore, we use our proposed dataset and employ transfer learning to train the XLM (cross-lingual language model) for translation tasks. To fit the code-mixing scenario, we adapt XLM slightly. We found that by using linguistic knowledge, rules, and language tags, the model produces good results on CM data translation while maintaining monolingual translation quality.

Code-mixing refers to the mixed use of multiple languages. It is prevalent in multilingual societies and is also one of the most challenging natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we study Bahasa Rojak, a dialect popular in Malaysia that consists of English, Malay, and Chinese. Aiming to establish a model to deal with the code-mixing phenomena of Bahasa Rojak, we use data augmentation to automatically construct the first Bahasa Rojak corpus for pre-training language models, which we name the Bahasa Rojak Crawled Corpus (BRCC). We also develop a new pre-trained model called “Mixed XLM”. The model can tag the language of the input token automatically to process code-mixing input. Finally, to test the effectiveness of the Mixed XLM model pre-trained on BRCC for social media scenarios where code-mixing is found frequently, we compile a new Bahasa Rojak sentiment analysis dataset, SentiBahasaRojak, with a Kappa value of 0.77.

To provide analysis of recent researches of automatic question generation from text,we surveyed 9 papers between 2019 to early 2021, retrieved from Paper with Code(PwC). Our research follows the survey reported by Kurdi et al.(2020), in which analysis of 93 papers from 2014 to early2019 are provided. We analyzed the 9papers from aspects including: (1) purpose of question generation, (2) generation method, and (3) evaluation. We found that recent approaches tend to rely on semantic information and Transformer-based models are attracting increasing interest since they are more efficient. On the other hand,since there isn’t any widely acknowledged automatic evaluation metric designed for question generation, researchers adopt metrics of other natural language processing tasks to compare different systems.