Pretrained multilingual contextual representations have shown great success, but due to the limits of their pretraining data, their benefits do not apply equally to all language varieties. This presents a challenge for language varieties unfamiliar to these models, whose labeled and unlabeled data is too limited to train a monolingual model effectively. We propose the use of additional language-specific pretraining and vocabulary augmentation to adapt multilingual models to low-resource settings. Using dependency parsing of four diverse low-resource language varieties as a case study, we show that these methods significantly improve performance over baselines, especially in the lowest-resource cases, and demonstrate the importance of the relationship between such models’ pretraining data and target language varieties.
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Syntax-driven Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition
In low resource settings, data augmentation strategies are commonly leveraged to improve performance. Numerous approaches have attempted document-level augmentation (e.g., text classification), but few studies have explored token-level augmentation. Performed naively, data augmentation can produce semantically incongruent and ungrammatical examples. In this work, we compare simple masked language model replacement and an augmentation method using constituency tree mutations to improve the performance of named entity recognition in low-resource settings with the aim of preserving linguistic cohesion of the augmented sentences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2006583
- PAR ID:
- 10436177
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Pattern-based Approaches to NLP in the Age of Deep Learning
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 56-60
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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