Part-of-Speech Tagging via Deep Neural Networks for Northern-Ethiopic Languages

Abstract

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have proven to be especially successful in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging—which is the process of mapping words to their corresponding POS labels depending on the context. Despite recent development of language technologies, low-resourced languages (such as an East African Tigrinya language), have received too little attention. We investigate the effectiveness of Deep Learning (DL) solutions for the low-resourced Tigrinya language of the Northern-Ethiopic branch. We have selected Tigrinya as the testbed example and have tested state-of-the-art DL approaches seeking to build the most accurate POS tagger. We have evaluated DNN classifiers (Feed Forward Neural Network – FFNN, Long Short-Term Memory method – LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, and Convolutional Neural Network – CNN) on a top of neural word2vec word embeddings with a small training corpus known as Nagaoka Tigrinya Corpus. To determine the best DNN classifier type, its architecture and hyper-parameter set both manual and automatic hyper-parameter tuning has been performed. BiLSTM method was proved to be the most suitable for our solving task: it achieved the highest accuracy equal to 92% that is 65% above the random baseline.