A House United: Bridging the Script and Lexical Barrier between Hindi and Urdu

Riyaz A. Bhat, Irshad A. Bhat, Naman Jain, Dipti Misra Sharma


Abstract
In Computational Linguistics, Hindi and Urdu are not viewed as a monolithic entity and have received separate attention with respect to their text processing. From part-of-speech tagging to machine translation, models are separately trained for both Hindi and Urdu despite the fact that they represent the same language. The reasons mainly are their divergent literary vocabularies and separate orthographies, and probably also their political status and the social perception that they are two separate languages. In this article, we propose a simple but efficient approach to bridge the lexical and orthographic differences between Hindi and Urdu texts. With respect to text processing, addressing the differences between the Hindi and Urdu texts would be beneficial in the following ways: (a) instead of training separate models, their individual resources can be augmented to train single, unified models for better generalization, and (b) their individual text processing applications can be used interchangeably under varied resource conditions. To remove the script barrier, we learn accurate statistical transliteration models which use sentence-level decoding to resolve word ambiguity. Similarly, we learn cross-register word embeddings from the harmonized Hindi and Urdu corpora to nullify their lexical divergences. As a proof of the concept, we evaluate our approach on the Hindi and Urdu dependency parsing under two scenarios: (a) resource sharing, and (b) resource augmentation. We demonstrate that a neural network-based dependency parser trained on augmented, harmonized Hindi and Urdu resources performs significantly better than the parsing models trained separately on the individual resources. We also show that we can achieve near state-of-the-art results when the parsers are used interchangeably.
Anthology ID:
C16-1039
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
397–408
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1039
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Riyaz A. Bhat, Irshad A. Bhat, Naman Jain, and Dipti Misra Sharma. 2016. A House United: Bridging the Script and Lexical Barrier between Hindi and Urdu. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 397–408, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
A House United: Bridging the Script and Lexical Barrier between Hindi and Urdu (Bhat et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1039.pdf