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Improved Named Entity Recognition using Machine Translation-based Cross-lingual Information

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In this paper, we describe a technique t improve named entity recognition in a resource-poo language (Hindi) by using cross-lingual information We use an on-line machine translation system and separate word alignment phase to find the projection o each Hindi word into the translated English sentence We estimate the cross-lingual features using an Englis named entity recognizer and the alignment information We use these cross-lingual features in a support vecto machine-based classifier. The use of cross-lingua features improves F1 score by 2.1 points absolute (2.9 relative) over a good-performing baseline model.
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Computación y Sistemas, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2016, pp. 495–504
ISSN 1405-5546
doi: 10.13053/CyS-20-3-2468
Improved Named Entity Recognition using Machine
Translation-based Cross-lingual Information
Sandipan Dandapat1, Andy Way2
1Microsoft,
India
2ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University,
Ireland
sadandap@microsoft.com, away@computing.dcu.ie
Abstract. In this paper, we describe a technique to
improve named entity recognition in a resource-poor
language (Hindi) by using cross-lingual information.
We use an on-line machine translation system and a
separate word alignment phase to find the projection of
each Hindi word into the translated English sentence.
We estimate the cross-lingual features using an English
named entity recognizer and the alignment information.
We use these cross-lingual features in a support vector
machine-based classifier. The use of cross-lingual
features improves F1score by 2.1 points absolute (2.9%
relative) over a good-performing baseline model.
Keywords. Named entity recognition, machine
translation, cross-lingual information.
1 Introduction
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential
task for natural language understanding to identify
the names in a given sentence. A Named Entity
(NE) primarily refers to the name of a person,
location or organization, but sometimes a larger set
of names have to be considered. The set of names
used in NER is often considered as the NE tagset.
In sum, NER is a multi-class classification problem.
A lot of work has been done in the area of
NER [23].1Researchers primarily use machine
learning-based techniques to address the NE
classification task. Almost all the work in this
area of research requires a substantial amount
1http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/conll2003/ner/
of linguistic expertise. The linguistic information
is required either to produce linguistic rules for
a rule-based system or to produce NE-annotated
data to train a statistical model.
The performance of a machine learning-based
NER system depends on the amount of data
used to train the system and the features used
to build the model. Some languages of the world
have large amounts of annotated data to train a
reasonably good NER system. However, there
remain a number of languages which suffer from
the scarcity of large NE-annotated data. In fact,
training data for NER only exists for restricted
combination of domains and genres (e.g. written
news) even for the most resource-rich languages.
In this work, we use information from a
resource-rich language (English) to improve the
NER task of a relatively less-resourced language
(Hindi). Although a large amount of NE-annotated
data is not always readily available for a language,
a large amount of parallel data may exist
between that language and English to obtain
cross-lingual information without needing to avail
of linguistic expertise. If such parallel text is
unavailable, a large number of third party freely
available MT systems might be found between
the less-resourced language and English. For
example, Google Translate2and Bing translator3
includes 8100 and 2704 possible source–target
2https://translate.google.com
3https://www.bing.com/translator/
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translation systems, respectively. In our work, first
we adopt Google Translate to translate the Hindi
NE-annotated text into English. Furthermore, we
use an English language NE recognizer to identify
different NE tags in the translated English text.
English NER has a very high accuracy [12]. We
incorporate English NER information into different
features of the source Hindi word using alignment
information. Finally, we use these cross-lingual
features along with monolingual features to build
our NER model.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
The next section presents related research in the
area. Section 3 details our particular approach.
Section 4 describes the cross-lingual feature
extraction process with an illustrative example.
Section 5 presents the experimental set-up, the
data and the results obtained from the different
experiments conducted. Section 6 presents our
observations along with an error analysis. We
conclude in Section 7 with some avenues for future
work.
2 Related Work
Prior work on NER mostly use either a rule-
based [14] or a machine learning (ML) approach [4,
5, 18, 27, 11], with the ML-based approach being
by far the most prevalent of the two. A wide
range of ML techniques are used for NER of
which Hidden Markov Model (HMM) [4], Maxi-
mum Entropy (MaxEnt) [5], Conditional Random
Field (CRF) [18] and Support Vector Machines
(SVM) [11] are quite popular. Researchers
have also applied hybrid approaches for the
NER task [27]. The ML-based techniques
primarily rely on the NE-annotated text as its
main knowledge-base. However, researchers
often use additional source of knowledge such as
gazetteer lists or grammatical information within a
ML technique [4, 5, 27].
More recently, the focus of NER has shifted
to multilingual NER. Richman and Schone [24]
proposed a technique to build large multilingual
NE-annotated data from Wikipedia using the un-
derlying multilingual characteristics. Researchers
also have been using parallel data to improve
NER systems. Developing annotated data (NE,
part-of-speech (POS) etc.) involves a lot of time,
money and other resources. In contrast, parallel
data may be available for many language pairs
due to the rapid growth of multilingual content
on the web. Yarowsky et al. [30] used bilingual
text corpora and English text analysis tools for
automatic NE-tagging in a foreign language. Kim et
al. [17] used a combination of Wikipedia metadata
and English–foreign language parallel Wikipedia
sentences to produce NE-labelled multilingual
data. Parallel data has also been used to
improve monolingual natural language processing
(NLP) models [7] or to improve models for both
languages simultaneously [6]. Parallel data has
also been used in unsupervised NLP models using
a projection from the resource-rich language to the
resource-poor language [9, 29].
Resource-poor languages may not have publicly
available parallel data (between the resource-poor
and a resource-rich language) to help in NLP tasks.
Thus instead of using parallel data, we use MT
systems to translate the resource-poor language
into a resource-rich language sentence in order
to use the information from the resource-rich
language [26]. Note that compared to (say)
European language pairs, MT is still in its infancy
and the quality is still poor for the language
pair English-to-Hindi. Thus we are projecting
information from noisy parallel data to try to
improve NER performance.
Basic NLP tools are often used to improve
translation quality [28, 15]. NER is used within
an MT framework to improve the MT system
by transliterating the names or by using a fixed
translation for the names [1, 16]. Significant
research work was carried out to improve MT
quality using NER. However, very little work has
been done in the reverse direction, i.e. to improve
NER using MT.
Shah et al. [26] used machine-translated data to
develop an NER system (SYNERGY) for Swahali
and Arabic. They use an online MT system to
translate the Swahali text into English, and English
NER to find list of NEs in English. Furthermore,
different alignment techniques were used to map
Swahali words to the English NEs. Our approach is
similar to their work with the following differences:
(i) SYNERGY uses only two NE classes (name
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and not name) while we use 15 different NE
classes, and (ii) we use translated text to adopt
cross-lingual features into a classification problem,
while SYNERGY uses purely projection-based
techniques to build an NER system.
A significant amount of work has been done
previously on NER for Hindi. Hindi is the main
language spoken in India, and the fourth most
commonly spoken language in the world. Most
of this research uses machine learning-based
techniques and different monolingual features to
build an NER system [11, 25]. Some recent work
has developed an NER system using customizable
rules automatically created via rule induction [21].
However, no work has ever used cross-lingual
features using either parallel data or an MT system
to reduce the data sparsity problem of Hindi.
Recently conducted NLP tool contests4on NER
report very low accuracy for Hindi NER using 15
NE classes, with the wining team achieving an
accuracy of just 77.4%.
3 Our Approach
The NER task can be formally defined as follows:
given a sentence S=w1. . . wn, we want to
find the possible NE tag tifor each word wi
in S. The NE tag for a particular word wiis
assigned from a predefined NE tagset T. Thus,
NER can be considered as a classification problem
or a sequence-labelling problem. We use an
SVM model [8] to build our NER system. SVM
is a discriminative model of learning which uses
both positive and negative examples to learn the
distinction between two classes. Like all other
discriminative approaches, an SVM model also
uses feature vectors for each training instance to
learn the classifier. In our approach, we use the
YamCha5toolkit to train the model and to classify
new instances. We used TinySVM6within YamCha
for NER training and classification. In this paper,
we do not aim to explore the best configuration
of the SVM classifier; rather we explore how an
MT system can be used to improve state-of-the-art
NER systems.
4http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/icon/2013/nlptools/
5http://chasen.org/~taku/software/yamcha/
6http://cl.naist.jp/~taku-ku/software/TinySVM/
3.1 System Architecture
In our system, we use both monolingual and
cross-lingual features to build the SVM model.
Monolingual features are estimated from the
NE-annotated data (cf. Section 3.2). Central to our
approach is the Cross-lingual Feature Estimator,
as shown in Figure 1. We use Google Translate,
the Stanford English NER toolkit7[12] and an
unsupervised word aligner GIZA++ [22] to estimate
the cross-lingual features. First, we extract the raw
Hindi text (HR) from the Hindi NE-annotated data
(H). Google Translate is used to translate the Hindi
text HRinto English (E). The unsupervised word
aligner GIZA++ takes both the corpus HRand E,
and produces an alignment (a:ij) between
each pair of sentences: the Hindi sentence hHR
and its translation eE. The alignment function
a:ijindicates that the i-th word of the Hindi
sentence hmaps to the j-th word of the English
sentence e. Note that one word in hmay map
to multiple words in e. Furthermore, we use the
Stanford English NER toolkit to estimate the NE
tag for every word in the English translated text E.
After obtaining the alignment between hand e, and
the NE-annotation of efor all Hindi sentences in the
corpus (H), we estimate the cross-lingual features
for each Hindi word in H. We illustrate the process
with a running example in Section 4.
3.2 Monolingual Features
We use state-of-the-art monolingual features which
are often used for Hindi NER [25] including both
static and dynamic features. The static features
include information from words and POS context.
The static features also include prefix and suffix
information for all words. The term prefix/suffix is a
sequence of the first/last few characters of a word,
which does not necessarily imply a linguistically
meaningful prefix and suffix. The dynamic features
include the NE tags of the previous two words.
Table 1 lists all the features used in our SVM model.
A combination of these features is used to conduct
two baseline experiments for the NER task.
7http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
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Fig. 1. System Architecture of the NER System. hi : Hindi and en: English
Static Features
Type Features
Word wi,wi1,wi2,wi+1,wi+2
POS pi,pi1,pi2
Affixes |pref| ≤ 4,|suff| ≤ 4
Dynamic Features
NE-tag ti1,ti2
Table 1. Monolingual Features Used for NER
3.3 Cross-lingual Features
We use cross-lingual features along with mono-
lingual features to improve the NER task.
The cross-lingual features are extracted from a
resource-rich language for which we already have
a reasonably good NER system. In our case we
consider English as the resource-rich language.
In our approach, we assume the availability of
an MT system from the language of interest into
the resource-rich language. We adopt the Google
Hindi-to-English MT system.
It is important to note that the correctness of
the cross-lingual features largely depends on the
translation quality of the MT system. We could
not conduct the automatic evaluation to estimate
the translation quality for our particular data as
we do not have reference translation for the NE
annotated corpus, so we carried out a small human
evaluation. While manually evaluating the MT
systems, we assign values from two five-point
scales representing fluency and adequacy [20].
We performed a manual evaluation of randomly
selected 100 sentences of the Hindi-to-English
MT output by 2 evaluators. The average fluency
and adequacy for the Hindi-to-English MT output
are 2.69 and 2.73, respectively (inter annotator
agreement [13] of 0.51 and 0.46, respectively).
This indicate the overall translation quality is still
in infancy for Hindi-to-English MT however, much
of the meaning is conveyed by the MT system [20].
During cross-lingual feature extraction, we try
to find whether the translation of a Hindi word
belongs to a particular NE in the resource-rich
language. Note that a Hindi word may correspond
to several words in English as in example (1). Thus
we consider cross-lingual features as a vector of
integers(=count) to accumulate cues from English.
If the translation of the Hindi word belongs to a
particular NE then that information is projected into
the feature vector. It is likely that NEs remain
in the same class across languages. The main
issue is that the aligner (GIZA++) may not find the
correct alignment. Thus, cross-lingual projections
are used as features where otherwise English NEs
could have been used as NE tags for the Hindi
words; indeed, in Section 5 we use such a model
to demonstrate indicative performance.
Another issue is that the number of tags may
differ between two languages. Our cross-lingual
features use the number of NE tags available in the
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doi: 10.13053/CyS-20-3-2468
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Algorithm 1 Cross-lingual feature extraction
algorithm
Require: H= List of Hindi NE-annotated sen-
tences
Ensure: Cross-lingual feature set
F=Is Person?, Is Location?, Is
Organization?, Other NE?
1: EGoogleTranslator(HR)//HRis the list of
raw Hindi sentences
2: Aalign HRand Eusing GIZA++
3: for all hHRand a:{h,e} ∈ Ado
4: NEnglishNER(e)
5: for all wihdo
6: Fwi=0, 0, 0, 0
7: Find English words T(= {wj} ∈ e)based
on alignment function a:ij
8: for all wjTdo
9: Update Fwibased on the NE tag of wj
N
//Add 1 if the NE tag of wjmatches with
any of the tags in the feature vector
10: end for
11: return Fwi
12: end for
13: end for
resource-rich language regardless of the number
of tags available in the Hindi NE-annotated data,
i.e. the number of features is equal to the number
of tags available in English. We use two variants
of the Stanford NE recognizer which uses 4 and
7 NE classes and accordingly generates 4 and 7
cross-lingual features in our system, respectively.
The detail of our cross-lingual feature extraction
process is given in Algorithm 1 when using 4
cross-lingual features.
Lines 1-2 of the algorithm translate raw Hindi
sentences from the NE-tagged data into English
(E) using Google Translator and aligns HRwith E.
In line 4, we estimate the NE-tags for an English
sentence e. In steps 5-7, we find the English
words that map to a source Hindi word and initialize
the feature vector to all 0s. In steps 8-10, we
update the feature vector based on the NE tags
associated with the mapped English words using
the OR operation (in line 9). This is to ensure
that if any of the mapped English words (in case
of multiple words aligned to a single Hindi word)
indicate an NE tag, we consider that the Hindi word
is likely to belong to the same NE category.
4 An Illustrative Example
We describe below the cross-lingual feature
extraction process with a running example from our
corpus. Consider the Hindi NE-tagged sentence
from the annotated corpus in (1a). All the words
are represented in word/POS-tag/NE-tag format.
Expansion of POS tags can be found in [3].
The Hindi raw sentence from (1a) is translated
into English in (1b) and aligned in (1c). Note that
(1b) is a machine-translated sentence.
(1) a. अनुका/NN/B-PERSON को/PSP/O-NE खासतौर/NN/O-NE
पर/PSP/O-NE ाजील/NNP/B-LOCATION बहत/QF/O-NE
पसंद/NN/O-NE ह/VAUX/O-NE ./SYM/O-NE
b. e: Anushka is very much like particularly Brazil .
c. h: अनुका ({1}) को ({ }) खासतौर ({6}) पर ({ })
ाजील ({4 5 7 }) बहत ({3}) पसंद ({ }) ह({2
}) . ({8})
The Hindi sentence in (1c) is listed word by word
with reference to the aligned English word(s) in e.
For example, the word ‘अनुका ({1})’ is aligned to
the first English word Anushka, the word ‘को ({ })’
is not mapped to any English word and ‘ाजील ({4 5
7})’ is mapped to three English words {much{4},
like{5}and Brazil{7}}.
The NE-tagged output using the Stanford tagger
is shown in (2) for the translated English sentence
in (1b). Example (2) represents the sentence
with word/NE-tag format where ‘O’ indicates not a
name.
(2) N: Anushka/PERSON is/O very/O much/O
like/O particularly/O Brazil/LOCATION ./O
For each word in hi, we initialize the cross-lingual
feature vector to 0, 0, 0, 0based on step 6 of
Algorithm 1. The four fields of the feature
vector indicate Is Person?, Is Location?, Is
Organization?, Other NE?(4 NE tags of the
Stanford tagger). For example, initially अनुका
0, 0, 0, 0and ाजील ≡ ⟨0, 0, 0, 0. Based on (2),
the word ‘अनुका’ is projected to ‘Anushka/PERSON’
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using the mapping from (1c). Thus the word
अनुका’ is a potential candidate for PERSON name
and we update the feature vector to 1, 0, 0, 0.
Similarly, the word ाजील is mapped to three words
(much,like and Brazil). We find only one of these
words (Brazil) belongs to LOCATION type and the
remaining two words (much and like) are not NEs.
Thus the cross-lingual feature vector for the word
ाजील is 0, 1, 0, 0. Note that more than one field in
the feature vector can be ‘1’ if the mapped English
words point to different NE types. We combine
the above cross-lingual features with monolingual
features to produce the training instances for the
SVM-based classifier.
5 Experimental Set-up
First we conduct two different experiments to
estimate the baseline accuracy of our approach for
the Hindi NER task. We use two different sets of
monolingual features to train the baseline systems
and compare the results with our cross-lingual
feature-based approach. The following are the
feature vectors for the two baseline systems:
Baseline1:{wi,wi1,wi2,wi+1,wi+2 ,pi,
|pref | ≤ 4,|suff| ≤ 4,ti1,ti2}
Baseline2:{wi,wi1,wi2,wi+1,wi+2 ,pi,pi1,
pi2,|pref | ≤ 4,|suff| ≤ 4,ti1,ti2}
We conduct the second set of experiments
adding the cross-lingual features (cf. Section 3.3)
with the monolingual features used in the two base-
line experiments. We call them Baselinei+CL.
We conduct two different experiments within the
Baselinei+CL experiments.
— We use 4 different cross-lingual features (
Is Person?, Is Location?, Is Organization?,
Other NE?) (cf. Algorithm1) based on the
4 different NE classes of the Stanford English
NER. We call this system Baselinei+CL-4.
Note that, the Hindi NE-data has 15 different
NE classes.
Moreover, instead of considering only 4
classes, we consider the 7 NE-tags from
the Stanford NE recognizer to annotate the
English text. This generates a feature vector
of size 7. The four additional features included
here are Is Money?, Is Date?, Is Time?, Is
Percent?and there is no Other NE type.
We anticipate that the use of a larger number
of classes for the English NER will help to
improve the Hindi NER task using 15 NE
types. We call this system Baselinei+CL-7.
Furthermore, we assume that an equal number
of NE-tags for both Hindi and English may have
a higher impact while projecting information from
the resource-rich to the resource-poor language.
Thus, we merge the 15 NE classes from Hindi
into the 4 classes (Person, Location, Organization
and Others) of the Stanford NER tool. This gives
us equivalent tagsets for both the Hindi task and
the Stanford tagger. We conduct a third set
of experiments using the 4 cross-lingual features
and using 4 NE classes for Hindi. We call
this experiment Baselinei+CL-4eq. Note that the
Baseline systems also change (in accuracies) in
this setting.
Finally, we conduct another experiment to
understand the performance of the direct projection
of NEs between two languages based on GIZA++
alignment. This indeed justify the need of using
cross-lingual features in a classifier instead of
directly identifying NEs based on the alignment.
This direct mapping require equal number of NE
types between two languages. The number of
NE classes in Hindi NER task is different from
the Stanford English NE recognizer. Thus we
conduct this experiment only in the CL-4eq setup,
where English and Hindi NEs refer to an equivalent
tagset of 4 NE types. We shall call this Projection
Baseline. In this process, we assign the most likely
NE type to a Hindi word based on the alignment
information and the English NEs corresponding the
alignment. If multiple NE types are equally likely
for a Hindi word based on alignment function and
English-side NE types, we randomly select one
from them.
5.1 Data
For all experiments we used the Hindi NER data
from ICON2013 NLP tools contest.8The training
8http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/icon/2013/nlptools/index.
html
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System Precision Recall F1-score
Baseline1 78.27 67.46 72.46
Baseline1+CL-4 79.50 70.16 74.54
Baseline1+CL-7 78.46 69.37 73.63
Baseline2 82.32 73.17 77.48
Baseline2+CL-4 82.83 74.29 78.33
Baseline2+CL-7 82.11 74.29 78.00
Table 2. NER accuracy using cross-lingual features.
data consists of 3,583 sentences (approximately
70k words). We used 449 sentences from
ICON2013 test data to evaluate our system. The
test data contains a total of 630 NEs. All the
data is represented in Shakti Standard Format
(SSF) [2]. For our experiments, we transformed the
data from SSF to BIO format where B–X indicates
the first word of an NE type X,I-X indicates the
intermediate word of an NE type Xand Oindicates
a word outside a NE. Note that the best reported
system performance achieved for Hindi in the
ICON2013 contest with this data set is 77.44% [10]
using both linguistic and word-based features
along with a gazetteer list and post-processing
rules.
6 Results and Observations
We measure tagging accuracy in terms of
Precision,Recall and F1-score. F1-score is the
harmonic mean of precision and recall: F1=
2.precision.recall/(precision +recall). Table 2
shows the results obtained with different systems
for the first two sets of experiments. We evaluate
our NER systems using the CONLL-20009shared
task evaluation strategy. Table 3 shows the
accuracy obtained from our third set of experiments
using an equal number of NE classes for Hindi and
English.
The effect of cross-lingual features on different
NE classes is given in Table 4. We compare
the Baseline1 system with the Baseline1+CL-4
system.
9http://conll.cemantix.org/2011/task-description.
html
System Precision Recall F1score
Baseline1 78.08 68.41 72.93
Baseline2 82.84 75.08 78.77
Projection Baseline 36.36 30.14 33.04
Baseline1+CL-4eq 78.95 71.43 75.00
Baseline2+CL-4eq 83.36 75.56 79.27
Table 3. NER accuracy using cross-lingual features and
equal number of NE classes in both languages.
Baseline1 Baseline1+CL-4
PERSON(58)61.86 66.02
LOCATION(377)78.68 80.68
ORGANIZATION(15)50.00 52.17
MONEY(3) 50.00 66.67
DISTANCE(21) 87.80 92.68
COUNT(15) 46.67 50.00
LIVTHINGS(35) 55.56 58.18
ARTIFACT(25) 42.42 42.42
DISEASE(10) 80.00 80.00
ENTERTAINMENT(28) 79.17 79.17
LOCOMOTIVE(4) 66.67 66.67
MATERIALS(20) 50.00 50.00
PLANTS(6) 50.00 50.00
QUANTITY(5) 80.00 80.00
Table 4. Comparison of F1-score for different NE types.
The first column represents different NE tags and their
frequency in the test data. ‘*’ indicates the NE types that
are common between the Hindi task and English NER.
6.1 Summary of the Results
We found that the inclusion of cross-lingual
features projected from a resource-rich language
improves the NER accuracy (cf. Table 2). We found
that Baseline1+CL-4 gives an improvement of 2.08
points F1-score over the Baseline1 model (2.9%
relative). Furthermore, when a larger monolingual
feature set is used in Baseline2 model, we found
an improvement of 0.85 points (1.1% relative) in
F1-score in Baseline2+CL-4 system.
The use of 7 NE types gives an improvement
of 1.17 points (1.6% relative) and 0.52 points
(0.7% relative) F1-score for Baseline1+CL-7 and
Baseline2+CL-7 system, respectively, compared to
their relative baseline scores. These improvements
are lower compared to the improvement from
Baseline1+CL-4 and Baseline2+CL-4 systems.
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In Table 4, we find that there are significant
improvements in F1-score for PERSON, LOCA-
TION and ORGANIZATION types. These three
NE types are common in both the Hindi NE tagset
and Stanford 4 NE tags. Note that 71% of the
NEs in the test document belong to these three
NE types. Thus an improvement in these three
NE types gives a significant improvement in the
overall accuracy. Only 4 tag types (MONEY,
DISTANCE, COUNT and LIVTHINGS) show some
improvement out of a total of 11 tags that are not
common between the two tagsets. However, these
tags occur less frequently in the corpus compared
to PERSON and LOCATION. Thus these tags have
a lesser contribution to the overall accuracy. Most
interestingly, we found that the accuracy does not
drop for any of the tag type.
We expected the use of an equal number of
tags in both the resource-rich and resource-poor
language to improve NER accuracy. This is
reflected in Table 3. We found 2.07 points
(2.8% relative) and 0.50 points (0.6% relative)
improvement in F1-score with Baseline1+CL-4eq
and Baseline2+CL-4eq systems, respectively, com-
pared to the relative baseline system. This
improvement is comparable to the improvement
we obtained in our second set of experiments
(cf. Table 4). Note that the direct projection
of NEs has very low score (F1=33.04%) which
essentially indicates direct cross-lingual projection
is not effective for NE recognition in Hindi using
English-to-Hindi MT system. Altogether, in all our
experiments we found that use of cross-lingual
features projected from the resource-rich language
to the resource-poor language improves the NER
accuracy regardless of the feature set used.
6.2 Assessment of Error Types
Errors are propagated mostly due to errors in the
GIZA++ alignment and incorrect NE recognition
in the English text. Due to alignment errors,
some potential Hindi NE words do not map to the
actual corresponding word in the English sentence.
This produces misleading features for the wrongly
aligned Hindi word. In example (3b), the word
मुंबई does not map to any word in (3a) despite the
correct aligning word (Bombay) being present in e.
(3) a. e: Royal Bombay continued into the 20th
century .
b. h:राजसी ({1}) मुंबई ({ }) का ( ) िनमण ({ }) २०वॴ
({2 3 4 6 }) शतादी ({7}) म ({ }) भी ({ }) रहा
({ }) . ({8})
Sometimes the potential Hindi NE word is
aligned to the correct word in the translated English
sentence ebut the English NER produces an
incorrect NE tag for the English word. In example
(4b) the word दीव is mapped to the correct English
word Diu in (5a) but the Stanford NER marks it as
Diu/O (not a name).
(4) a. e: It/O is/O also/O the/O story/O of/O Diu/O
./O
b. h:ऐसा ({1}) िकसा ({5}) दीव ({7}) का ({6
}) भी ({3}) ह({2}) . ({8})
Finally, we use an MT system to translate
the Hindi sentence into English. The translation
system sometimes fails to produce an accurate
enough translation to allow the correct translated
word to be found for a given potential Hindi NE
word.
7 Conclusion
Our experiments show that MT systems can be
used to project information from resource-rich
languages to resource-poor ones. These
projections can be used as cross-lingual features
in the classification problem. We have shown that
NER for a resource-poor language Hindi can be
improved using a Hindi-to-English MT system and
English NER. Our best performance improvement
results in 2.1 (2.9% relative) F1score improvement
over the baseline.
So far our system has been tested for just one
classification problem, namely NER. In order to test
the effectiveness of our approach, we plan to use
our approach for other NLP classification problems
(viz. POS labelling, NP chunking). We have tested
our approach using one learning algorithm and
we plan to test our approach over a wide range
of classification algorithms using state-of-the-art
features. We also plan to use different word
aligners (e.g. [19]) to compare the effect of
alignment in our work.
Computación y Sistemas, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2016, pp. 495–504
ISSN 1405-5546
doi: 10.13053/CyS-20-3-2468
503
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by Science Founda-
tion Ireland through the ADAPT Centre (Grant
13/RC/2106) (www.adaptcentre.ie) at Dublin City
University and Trinity College Dublin, and by Grant
610879 for the Falcon project funded by the
European Commission.
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Sandipan Dandapat is a Senior Applied Re-
searcher at Microsoft India. He has been working
in the field of NLP for about 10 years and have
more than 30 publications in reputed international
conferences and journals.His primary research
area is Machine Translation. Apart from Machine
Translation, he has also worked on morphological
analyzer and generator, POS Taggers, intelligent
linguistic annotation framework, MWE’s.
Andy Way is Professor in Computing at Dublin City
University (DCU). He is also Deputy Director of
the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology
(formerly CNGL). His research interests include
all areas of machine translation, which he has
applied to a career that has spanned academia
and industry. In 2015 Professor Way received the
DCU Presidents Research Award in recognition
of his contribution to the field of computing.
From 200915, Professor Way was President of
the European Association for Machine Translation,
and from 201113 President of the International
Association for Machine Translation. He has been
Editor of the leading journal, Machine Translation,
since 2007.
Article received on 07/01/2016; accepted on 28/02/2016.
Corresponding author is Sandipan Dandapat.
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Named entity recognizer for Indian languages
  • S L Devi
  • C Malarkodi
  • K Marimuthu
  • C Chrompet
Devi, S. L., Malarkodi, C., Marimuthu, K., & Chrompet, C. (2013). Named entity recognizer for Indian languages. ICON NLP Tool Contest.