Hierarchical self attention based sequential labelling model for Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi languages

Abstract

Sequential labelling plays a vital role in solving numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Machine Translation and Information Extraction etc. One of these is Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging, which assigns a sequence of grammatical categories to the given sentence, and Chunking which groups them into ‘chunks’ or what can be called minimal phrases. Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi are low resource languages and widely spoken in central north-eastern India, belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family. The creation of an annotated corpus for POS tagging and Chunking, and then building an initial automatic tool for these problems is the first attempt towards building language technology tools for these languages. The annotated corpus used to develop POS Taggers and Chunkers, based on various machine learning algorithms (TnT, CRF, MEMM and Structured SVM) and state-of-the-art LSTM-CNN-CRF model, and then these compared with the obtained results on two new proposed deep learning-based models, Self-Attention Hierarchical Bi-LSTM CRF (SAHBiLC) and a fine-tuned version of it, Fine-SAHBiLC. The SAHBiLC and Fine-SAHBiLC models outperform on Bhojpuri (Accuracy for POS and Chunking is 0.86% and 0.94%, respectively) and Maithili (Accuracy for POS and Chunking is 0.86% and 0.95%, respectively) and Magahi (Accuracy for POS is 0.86%). © 2021 The Authors