Virtual assistants and text chatbots have recently been gaining popularity. Given the short message nature of text-based chat interactions, the language identification systems of these bots might only have 15 or 20 characters to make a prediction. However, accurate text language identification is important, especially in the early stages of many multilingual natural language processing pipelines. This paper investigates the use of a naive Bayes classifier, to accurately predict the language family that a piece of text belongs to, combined with a lexicon based classifier to distinguish the specific South African language that the text is written in. This approach leads to a 31% reduction in the language detection error. In the spirit of reproducible research the training and testing datasets as well as the code are published on github. Hopefully it will be useful to create a text language identification shared task for South African languages.
This paper describes the WiLI-2018 benchmark dataset for monolingual written natural language identification. WiLI-2018 is a publicly available, free of charge dataset of short text extracts from Wikipedia. It contains 1000 paragraphs of 235 languages, totaling in 23500 paragraphs. WiLI is a classification dataset: Given an unknown paragraph written in one dominant language, it has to be decided which language it is.
Language identification of social media text still remains a challenging task due to properties like code-mixing and inconsistent phonetic transliterations. In this paper, we present a supervised learning approach for language identification at the word level of low resource Bengali-English code-mixed data taken from social media. We employ two methods of word encoding, namely character based and root phone based to train our deep LSTM models. Utilizing these two models we created two ensemble models using stacking and threshold technique which gave 91.78% and 92.35% accuracies respectively on our testing data.
In this paper, we discuss an attempt to develop an automatic language identification system for 5 closely-related Indo-Aryan languages of India, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj, Hindi and Magahi. We have compiled a comparable corpora of varying length for these languages from various resources. We discuss the method of creation of these corpora in detail. Using these corpora, a language identification system was developed, which currently gives state of the art accuracy of 96.48\%. We also used these corpora to study the similarity between the 5 languages at the lexical level, which is the first data-based study of the extent of closeness of these languages.
A novel learnable dictionary encoding layer is proposed in this paper for end-to-end language identification. It is inline with the conventional GMM i-vector approach both theoretically and practically. We imitate the mechanism of traditional GMM training and Supervector encoding procedure on the top of CNN. The proposed layer can accumulate high-order statistics from variable-length input sequence and generate an utterance level fixed-dimensional vector representation. Unlike the conventional methods, our new approach provides an end-to-end learning framework, where the inherent dictionary are learned directly from the loss function. The dictionaries and the encoding representation for the classifier are learned jointly. The representation is orderless and therefore appropriate for language identification. We conducted a preliminary experiment on NIST LRE07 closed-set task, and the results reveal that our proposed dictionary encoding layer achieves significant error reduction comparing with the simple average pooling.
A novel interpretable end-to-end learning scheme for language identification is proposed. It is in line with the classical GMM i-vector methods both theoretically and practically. In the end-to-end pipeline, a general encoding layer is employed on top of the front-end CNN, so that it can encode the variable-length input sequence into an utterance level vector automatically. After comparing with the state-of-the-art GMM i-vector methods, we give insights into CNN, and reveal its role and effect in the whole pipeline. We further introduce a general encoding layer, illustrating the reason why they might be appropriate for language identification. We elaborate on several typical encoding layers, including a temporal average pooling layer, a recurrent encoding layer and a novel learnable dictionary encoding layer. We conducted experiment on NIST LRE07 closed-set task, and the results show that our proposed end-to-end systems achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Language identification has become a prerequisite for all kinds of automated text processing systems. In this paper, we present a rule-based language identifier tool for two closely related Indo-Aryan languages: Hindi and Magahi. This system has currently achieved an accuracy of approx 86.34%. We hope to improve this in the future. Automatic identification of languages will be significant in the accuracy of output of Web Crawlers.
In this work, we present an approach based on combining string kernels and word embeddings for automatic essay scoring. String kernels capture the similarity among strings based on counting common character n-grams, which are a low-level yet powerful type of feature, demonstrating state-of-the-art results in various text classification tasks such as Arabic dialect identification or native language identification. To our best knowledge, we are the first to apply string kernels to automatically score essays. We are also the first to combine them with a high-level semantic feature representation, namely the bag-of-super-word-embeddings. We report the best performance on the Automated Student Assessment Prize data set, in both in-domain and cross-domain settings, surpassing recent state-of-the-art deep learning approaches.
Language identification (LI) is the problem of determining the natural language that a document or part thereof is written in. Automatic LI has been extensively researched for over fifty years. Today, LI is a key part of many text processing pipelines, as text processing techniques generally assume that the language of the input text is known. Research in this area has recently been especially active. This article provides a brief history of LI research, and an extensive survey of the features and methods used so far in the LI literature. For describing the features and methods we introduce a unified notation. We discuss evaluation methods, applications of LI, as well as off-the-shelf LI systems that do not require training by the end user. Finally, we identify open issues, survey the work to date on each issue, and propose future directions for research in LI.
Code-switching is a phenomenon of mixing grammatical structures of two or more languages under varied social constraints. The code-switching data differ so radically from the benchmark corpora used in NLP community that the application of standard technologies to these data degrades their performance sharply. Unlike standard corpora, these data often need to go through additional processes such as language identification, normalization and/or back-transliteration for their efficient processing. In this paper, we investigate these indispensable processes and other problems associated with syntactic parsing of code-switching data and propose methods to mitigate their effects. In particular, we study dependency parsing of code-switching data of Hindi and English multilingual speakers from Twitter. We present a treebank of Hindi-English code-switching tweets under Universal Dependencies scheme and propose a neural stacking model for parsing that efficiently leverages part-of-speech tag and syntactic tree annotations in the code-switching treebank and the preexisting Hindi and English treebanks. We also present normalization and back-transliteration models with a decoding process tailored for code-switching data. Results show that our neural stacking parser is 1.5% LAS points better than the augmented parsing model and our decoding process improves results by 3.8% LAS points over the first-best normalization and/or back-transliteration.
Language recognition system is typically trained directly to optimize classification error on the target language labels, without using the external, or meta-information in the estimation of the model parameters. However labels are not independent of each other, there is a dependency enforced by, for example, the language family, which affects negatively on classification. The other external information sources (e.g. audio encoding, telephony or video speech) can also decrease classification accuracy. In this paper, we attempt to solve these issues by constructing a deep hierarchical neural network, where different levels of meta-information are encapsulated by attentive prediction units and also embedded into the training progress. The proposed method learns auxiliary tasks to obtain robust internal representation and to construct a variant of attentive units within the hierarchical model. The final result is the structural prediction of the target language and a closely related language family. The algorithm reflects a "staircase" way of learning in both its architecture and training, advancing from the fundamental audio encoding to the language family level and finally to the target language level. This process not only improves generalization but also tackles the issues of imbalanced class priors and channel variability in the deep neural network model. Our experimental findings show that the proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art i-vector approaches on both small and big language corpora by a significant margin.
In this paper we present NLI-PT, the first Portuguese dataset compiled for Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author's first language based on their second language writing. The dataset includes 1,868 student essays written by learners of European Portuguese, native speakers of the following L1s: Chinese, English, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Tetum, Arabic, Polish, Korean, Romanian, and Swedish. NLI-PT includes the original student text and four different types of annotation: POS, fine-grained POS, constituency parses, and dependency parses. NLI-PT can be used not only in NLI but also in research on several topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition and educational NLP. We discuss possible applications of this dataset and present the results obtained for the first lexical baseline system for Portuguese NLI.
The fundamental frequency (F0) contour of speech is a key aspect to represent speech prosody that finds use in speech and spoken language analysis such as voice conversion and speech synthesis as well as speaker and language identification. This work proposes new methods to estimate the F0 contour of speech using deep neural networks (DNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). They are trained using supervised learning with the ground truth of F0 contours. The latest prior research addresses this problem first as a frame-by-frame-classification problem followed by sequence tracking using deep neural network hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM) hybrid architecture. This study, however, tackles the problem as a regression problem instead, in order to obtain F0 contours with higher frequency resolution from clean and noisy speech. Experiments using PTDB-TUG corpus contaminated with additive noise (NOISEX-92) show the proposed method improves gross pitch error (GPE) by more than 25 % at signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) between -10 dB and +10 dB as compared with one of the most noise-robust F0 trackers, PEFAC. Furthermore, the performance on fine pitch error (FPE) is improved by approximately 20 % against a state-of-the-art DNN-HMM-based approach.
Most real world language problems require learning from heterogenous corpora, raising the problem of learning robust models which generalise well to both similar (in domain) and dissimilar (out of domain) instances to those seen in training. This requires learning an underlying task, while not learning irrelevant signals and biases specific to individual domains. We propose a novel method to optimise both in- and out-of-domain accuracy based on joint learning of a structured neural model with domain-specific and domain-general components, coupled with adversarial training for domain. Evaluating on multi-domain language identification and multi-domain sentiment analysis, we show substantial improvements over standard domain adaptation techniques, and domain-adversarial training.
Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions,sentiments, attitudes and emotions. Songs are important to sentiment analysis since the songs and mood are mutually dependent on each other. Based on the selected song it becomes easy to find the mood of the listener, in future it can be used for recommendation. The song lyric is a rich source of datasets containing words that are helpful in analysis and classification of sentiments generated from it. Now a days we observe a lot of inter-sentential and intra-sentential code-mixing in songs which has a varying impact on audience. To study this impact we created a Telugu songs dataset which contained both Telugu-English code-mixed and pure Telugu songs. In this paper, we classify the songs based on its arousal as exciting or non-exciting. We develop a language identification tool and introduce code-mixing features obtained from it as additional features. Our system with these additional features attains 4-5% accuracy greater than traditional approaches on our dataset.
The rapid expansion in the usage of social media networking sites leads to a huge amount of unprocessed user generated data which can be used for text mining. Author profiling is the problem of automatically determining profiling aspects like the author's gender and age group through a text is gaining much popularity in computational linguistics. Most of the past research in author profiling is concentrated on English texts \cite{1,2}. However many users often change the language while posting on social media which is called code-mixing, and it develops some challenges in the field of text classification and author profiling like variations in spelling, non-grammatical structure and transliteration \cite{3}. There are very few English-Hindi code-mixed annotated datasets of social media content present online \cite{4}. In this paper, we analyze the task of author's gender prediction in code-mixed content and present a corpus of English-Hindi texts collected from Twitter which is annotated with author's gender. We also explore language identification of every word in this corpus. We present a supervised classification baseline system which uses various machine learning algorithms to identify the gender of an author using a text, based on character and word level features.
Automatic language identification is a natural language processing problem that tries to determine the natural language of a given content. In this paper we present a statistical method for automatic language identification of written text using dictionaries containing stop words and diacritics. We propose different approaches that combine the two dictionaries to accurately determine the language of textual corpora. This method was chosen because stop words and diacritics are very specific to a language, although some languages have some similar words and special characters they are not all common. The languages taken into account were romance languages because they are very similar and usually it is hard to distinguish between them from a computational point of view. We have tested our method using a Twitter corpus and a news article corpus. Both corpora consists of UTF-8 encoded text, so the diacritics could be taken into account, in the case that the text has no diacritics only the stop words are used to determine the language of the text. The experimental results show that the proposed method has an accuracy of over 90% for small texts and over 99.8% for