Since their inception, embeddings have become a primary ingredient in many flavours of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks supplanting earlier types of representation. Even though multilingual embeddings have been used for the increasing number of multilingual tasks, due to the scarcity of parallel training data, low-resource languages such as Sinhala, tend to focus more on monolingual embeddings. Then when it comes to the aforementioned multi-lingual tasks, it is challenging to utilize these monolingual embeddings given that even if the embedding spaces have a similar geometric arrangement due to an identical training process, the embeddings of the languages considered are not aligned. This is solved by the embedding alignment task. Even in this, high-resource language pairs are in the limelight while low-resource languages such as Sinhala which is in dire need of help seem to have fallen by the wayside. In this paper, we try to align Sinhala and English word embedding spaces based on available alignment techniques and introduce a benchmark for Sinhala language embedding alignment. In addition to that, to facilitate the supervised alignment, as an intermediate task, we also introduce Sinhala-English alignment datasets. These datasets serve as our anchor datasets for supervised word embedding alignment. Even though we do not obtain results comparable to the high-resource languages such as French, German, or Chinese, we believe our work lays the groundwork for more specialized alignment between English and Sinhala embeddings.
Keywords: Natural Language Processing | Machine Learning / Deep Learning | Sinhala | Word Embedding Alignment | Word Embeddings | Low-resource Languages | Translation |
@inproceedings{wickramasinghe2023sinhala2,
title={{Sinhala-English Word Embedding Alignment: Introducing Datasets and Benchmark for a Low Resource Language}},
author={Wickramasinghe, Kasun and de Silva, Nisansa},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 37th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
abstract={Since their inception, embeddings have become a primary ingredient in many flavours of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks supplanting earlier types of representation. Even though multilingual embeddings have been used for the increasing number of multilingual tasks, due to the scarcity of parallel training data, low-resource languages such as Sinhala, tend to focus more on monolingual embeddings. Then when it comes to the aforementioned multi-lingual tasks, it is challenging to utilize these monolingual embeddings given that even if the embedding spaces have a similar geometric arrangement due to an identical training process, the embeddings of the languages considered are not aligned. This is solved by the embedding alignment task. Even in this, high-resource language pairs are in the limelight while low-resource languages such as Sinhala which is in dire need of help seem to have fallen by the wayside. In this paper, we try to align Sinhala and English word embedding spaces based on available alignment techniques and introduce a benchmark for Sinhala language embedding alignment. In addition to that, to facilitate the supervised alignment, as an intermediate task, we also introduce Sinhala-English alignment datasets. These datasets serve as our anchor datasets for supervised word embedding alignment. Even though we do not obtain results comparable to the high-resource languages such as French, German, or Chinese, we believe our work lays the groundwork for more specialized alignment between English and Sinhala embeddings.},
pages={424--435},
year={2023},
misc={https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10436,NLP:ML:SIN,https://goo.gl/iY6aTr}
}
ActivePI: Nisansa de Silva
The Knowledge Representation project investigates methods for structuring, aligning, and reasoning over knowledge extracted from language, with particular emphasis on low-resource settings, domain-specific semantics, and intelligent information access.
ActivePI: Nisansa de Silva
We propose to advance natural language processing for low-resource settings by leveraging data augmentation, transfer learning, and model adaptation techniques to overcome the scarcity of annotated data and linguistic resources.
ActivePI: Nisansa de Silva
We propose to build and analyze Sinhala language resources, datasets, and models to strengthen NLP research for this low-resource language, while connecting it to English and Tamil through bilingual lexicons, embeddings, and cross-lingual methods.