2kenize: Tying Subword Sequences for Chinese Script Conversion

Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese character conversion is a common preprocessing step in Chinese NLP. Despite this, current approaches have poor performance because they do not take into account that a simplified Chinese character can correspond to multiple traditional characters. Here, we propose a model that can disambiguate between mappings and convert between the two scripts. The model is based on subword segmentation, two language models, as well as a method for mapping between subword sequences. We further construct benchmark datasets for topic classification and script conversion. Our proposed method outperforms previous Chinese Character conversion approaches by 6 points in accuracy. These results are further confirmed in a downstream application, where 2kenize is used to convert pretraining dataset for topic classification. An error analysis reveals that our method's particular strengths are in dealing with code-mixing and named entities.

Inflo: News Categorization and Keyphrase Extraction for Implementation in an Aggregation System

The work herein describes a system for automatic news category and keyphrase labeling, presented in the context of our motivation to improve the speed at which a user can find relevant and interesting content within an aggregation platform. A set of 12 discrete categories were applied to over 500,000 news articles for training a neural network, to be used to facilitate the more in-depth task of extracting the most significant keyphrases. The latter was done using three methods: statistical, graphical and numerical, using the pre-identified category label to improve relevance of extracted phrases. The results are presented in a demo in which the articles are pre-populated via News API, and upon being selected, the category and keyphrase labels will be computed via the methods explained herein.

Alignment Analysis of Sequential Segmentation of Lexicons to Improve Automatic Cognate Detection

Ranking functions in information retrieval are often used in search engines to recommend the relevant answers to the query. This paper makes use of this notion of information retrieval and applies onto the problem domain of cognate detection. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) positional segmentation, which incorporates the sequential notion; (2) graphical error modelling, which deduces the transformations. The current research work focuses on classification problem; which is distinguishing whether a pair of words are cognates. This paper focuses on a harder problem, whether we could predict a possible cognate from the given input. Our study shows that when language modelling smoothing methods are applied as the retrieval functions and used in conjunction with positional segmentation and error modelling gives better results than competing baselines, in both classification and prediction of cognates. Source code is at: https://github.com/pranav-ust/cognates