Challenging language-Dependent segmentation for Arabic: An application to machine translation and part-of-Speech tagging

Hassan Sajjad, Fahim Dalvi, Nadir Durrani, Ahmed Abdelali, Yonatan Belinkov, Stephan Vogel

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Word segmentation plays a pivotal role in improving any Arabic NLP application. Therefore, a lot of research has been spent in improving its accuracy. Off-the-shelf tools, however, are: i) complicated to use and ii) domain/dialect dependent. We explore three language-independent alternatives to morphological segmentation using: i) data-driven sub-word units, ii) characters as a unit of learning, and iii) word embeddings learned using a character CNN (Convolution Neural Network). On the tasks of Machine Translation and POS tagging, we found these methods to achieve close to, and occasionally surpass state-of-the-art performance. In our analysis, we show that a neural machine translation system is sensitive to the ratio of source and target tokens, and a ratio close to 1 or greater, gives optimal performance.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Short Papers)
Pages601-607
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626760
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 30 Jul 20174 Aug 2017

Publication series

NameACL 2017 - 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
Volume2

Conference

Conference55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period30/07/174/08/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Linguistics and Language

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