Phrase chunking remains an important natural language processing (NLP) technique for intermediate syntactic processing. This paper describes the development of protocols, annotated phrase chunking data sets and automatic phrase chunkers for ten South African languages. Various problems with adapting the existing annotation protocols of English are discussed as well as an overview of the annotated data sets. Based on the annotated sets, CRF-based phrase chunkers are created and tested with a combination of different features, including part of speech tags and character n-grams. The results of the phrase chunking evaluation show that disjunctively written languages can achieve notably better results for phrase chunking with a limited data set than conjunctive languages, but that the addition of character n-grams improve the results for conjunctive languages.
@InProceedings{EISELEN16.423,
author = {Roald Eiselen}, title = {South African Language Resources: Phrase Chunking}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper