Language universals and linguistic complexity : Three case studies in core argument marking

In this dissertation I study language complexity from a typological perspective. Since the structuralist era, it has been assumed that local complexity differences in languages are balanced out in cross-linguistic comparisons and that complexity is not affected by the geopolitical or sociocultural aspects of the speech community. However, these assumptions have seldom been studied systematically from a typological point of view. My objective is to define complexity so that it is possible to compare it across languages and to approach its variation with the methods of quantitative typology. My main empirical research questions are: i) does language complexity vary in any systematic way in local domains, and ii) can language complexity be affected by the geographical or social environment? These questions are studied in three articles, whose findings are summarized in the introduction to the dissertation. In order to enable cross-language comparison, I measure complexity as the description length of the regularities in an entity; I separate it from difficulty, focus on local instead of global complexity, and break it up into different types. This approach helps avoid the problems that plagued earlier metrics of language complexity. My approach to grammar is functional-typological in nature, and the theoretical framework is basic linguistic theory. I delimit the empirical research functionally to the marking of core arguments (the basic participants in the sentence). I assess the distributions of complexity in this domain with multifactorial statistical methods and use different sampling strategies, implementing, for instance, the Greenbergian view of universals as diachronic laws of type preference. My data come from large and balanced samples (up to approximately 850 languages), drawn mainly from reference grammars. The results suggest that various significant trends occur in the marking of core arguments in regard to complexity and that complexity in this domain correlates with population size. These results provide evidence that linguistic patterns interact among themselves in terms of complexity, that language structure adapts to the social environment, and that there may be cognitive mechanisms that limit complexity locally. My approach to complexity and language universals can therefore be successfully applied to empirical data and may serve as a model for further research in these areas.

FIN-CLARIN: A Framework for Depositing and Disseminating Language Resources for R&D

Researchers and developers in academia and industry would benefit from a facility that enables them to easily locate, licence and use the kind of empirical data they need for testing and refining their hypotheses and to deposit and disseminate their data e.g. to support replication and validation of reported scientific experiments. To answer these needs initially in Finland, there is an ongoing project at University of Helsinki and its collaborators to create a user-friendly web service for researchers and developers in Finland and other countries. In our talk, we describe ongoing work to create a palette of extensive but easily available Finnish language resources and technologies for the research community, including lexical resources, wordnets, morphologically tagged corpora, dependency syntactic treebanks and parsebanks, open-source finite state toolkits and libraries and language models to support text analysis and processing at customer site. Also first publicly available results are presented.

META-NORD: Towards Sharing of Language Resources in Nordic and Baltic Countries

This paper introduces the META-NORD project which develops Nordic and Baltic part of the European open language resource infrastructure. META-NORD works on assembling, linking across languages, and making widely available the basic language resources used by developers, professionals and researchers to build specific products and applications. The goals of the project, overall approach and specific focus lines on wordnets, terminology resources and treebanks are described. Moreover, results achieved in first five months of the project, i.e. language whitepapers, metadata specification and IPR, are presented.

Finite-State Spell-Checking with Weighted Language and Error Models

In this paper we present simple methods for construction and evaluation of finite-state spell-checking tools using an existing finite-state lexical automaton, freely available finite-state tools and Internet corpora acquired from projects such as Wikipedia. As an example, we use a freely available open-source implementation of Finnish morphology, made with traditional finite-state morphology tools, and demonstrate rapid building of Northern Sámi and English spell checkers from tools and resources available from the Internet.

Pruned Universal Symbol Sequences for LZW based Language identification

We present a improved language modeling technique for Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) based LID scheme. The previous approach to LID using LZW algorithm prepares the language pattern table using LZW algorithm. Because of the sequential nature of the LZW algorithm, several language specific patterns of the language were missing in the pattern table. To overcome this, we build a universal pattern table, which contains all patterns of different length. For each language it's corresponding language specific pattern table is constructed by retaining the patterns of the universal table whose frequency of appearance in the training data is above the threshold.This approach reduces the classification score (Compression Ratio [LZW-CR] or the weighted discriminant score[LZW-WDS]) for non native languages and increases the LID performance considerably.

LZW Based Distance Measures for Spoken Language Identification

We present a new approach to spoken language modeling for language identification (LID) using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm. The LZW technique is applicable to any kind of tokenization of the speech signal. Because of the efficiency of LZW algorithm to obtain variable length symbol strings in the training data, the LZW codebook captures the essentials of a language effectively. We develop two new deterministic measures for LID based on the LZW algorithm namely: (i) Compression ratio score (LZW-CR) and (ii) weighted discriminant score (LZW-WDS). To assess these measures, we consider error-free tokenization of speech as well as artificially induced noise in the tokenization. It is shown that for a 6 language LID task of OGI-TS database with clean tokenization, the new model (LZW-WDS) performs slightly better than the conventional bigram model. For noisy tokenization, which is the more realistic case, LZW-WDS significantly outperforms the bigram technique

Computational Biology and Language

Current scientific research is characterized by increasing specialization, accumulating knowledge at a high speed due to parallel advances in a multitude of sub-disciplines. Recent estimates suggest that human knowledge doubles every two to three years – and with the advances in information and communication technologies, this wide body of scientific knowledge is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. This may also be referred to as ambient intelligence – an environment characterized by plentiful and available knowledge. The bottleneck in utilizing this knowledge for specific applications is not accessing but assimilating the information and transforming it to suit the needs for a specific application. The increasingly specialized areas of scientific research often have the common goal of converting data into insight allowing the identification of solutions to scientific problems. Due to this common goal, there are strong parallels between different areas of applications that can be exploited and used to cross-fertilize different disciplines. For example, the same fundamental statistical methods are used extensively in speech and language processing, in materials science applications, in visual processing and in biomedicine. Each sub-discipline has found its own specialized methodologies making these statistical methods successful to the given application. The unification of specialized areas is possible because many different problems can share strong analogies, making the theories developed for one problem applicable to other areas of research. It is the goal of this paper to demonstrate the utility of merging two disparate areas of applications to advance scientific research. The merging process requires cross-disciplinary collaboration to allow maximal exploitation of advances in one sub-discipline for that of another. We will demonstrate this general concept with the specific example of merging language technologies and computational biology.

Language identification using parallel sub-word recognition

Parallel sub-word recognition (PSWR) is a new model that has been proposed for language identification (LID) which does not need elaborate phonetic labeling of the speech data in a foreign language. The new approach performs a front-end tokenization in terms of sub-word units which are designed by automatic segmentation, segment clustering and segment HMM modeling. We develop PSWR based LID in a framework similar to the parallel phone recognition (PPR) approach in the literature. This includes a front-end tokenizer and a back-end language model, for each language to be identified. Considering various combinations of the statistical evaluation scores, it is found that PSWR can perform as well as PPR, even with broad acoustic sub-word tokenization, thus making it an efficient alternative to the PPR system.

Suite of tools for statistical N-gram language modeling for pattern mining in whole genome sequences

Genome sequences contain a number of patterns that have biomedical significance. Repetitive sequences of various kinds are a primary component of most of the genomic sequence patterns. We extended the suffix-array based Biological Language Modeling Toolkit to compute n-gram frequencies as well as n-gram language-model based perplexity in windows over the whole genome sequence to find biologically relevant patterns. We present the suite of tools and their application for analysis on whole human genome sequence.

Language models for online handwritten Tamil word recognition

N-gram language models and lexicon-based word-recognition are popular methods in the literature to improve recognition accuracies of online and offline handwritten data. However, there are very few works that deal with application of these techniques on online Tamil handwritten data. In this paper, we explore methods of developing symbol-level language models and a lexicon from a large Tamil text corpus and their application to improving symbol and word recognition accuracies. On a test database of around 2000 words, we find that bigram language models improve symbol (3%) and word recognition (8%) accuracies and while lexicon methods offer much greater improvements (30%) in terms of word recognition, there is a large dependency on choosing the right lexicon. For comparison to lexicon and language model based methods, we have also explored re-evaluation techniques which involve the use of expert classifiers to improve symbol and word recognition accuracies.

PolyGLoT: A Polyhedral Loop Transformation Framework for a Graphical Dataflow Language

Polyhedral techniques for program transformation are now used in several proprietary and open source compilers. However, most of the research on polyhedral compilation has focused on imperative languages such as C, where the computation is specified in terms of statements with zero or more nested loops and other control structures around them. Graphical dataflow languages, where there is no notion of statements or a schedule specifying their relative execution order, have so far not been studied using a powerful transformation or optimization approach. The execution semantics and referential transparency of dataflow languages impose a different set of challenges. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by presenting techniques that can be used to extract polyhedral representation from dataflow programs and to synthesize them from their equivalent polyhedral representation. We then describe PolyGLoT, a framework for automatic transformation of dataflow programs which we built using our techniques and other popular research tools such as Clan and Pluto. For the purpose of experimental evaluation, we used our tools to compile LabVIEW, one of the most widely used dataflow programming languages. Results show that dataflow programs transformed using our framework are able to outperform those compiled otherwise by up to a factor of seventeen, with a mean speed-up of 2.30x while running on an 8-core Intel system.

Translation Induction on Indian Language Corpora Using Translingual Themes from Other Languages

Identifying translations from comparable corpora is a well-known problem with several applications, e.g. dictionary creation in resource-scarce languages. Scarcity of high quality corpora, especially in Indian languages, makes this problem hard, e.g. state-of-the-art techniques achieve a mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.66 for English-Italian, and a mere 0.187 for Telugu-Kannada. There exist comparable corpora in many Indian languages with other ``auxiliary'' languages. We observe that translations have many topically related words in common in the auxiliary language. To model this, we define the notion of a translingual theme, a set of topically related words from auxiliary language corpora, and present a probabilistic framework for translation induction. Extensive experiments on 35 comparable corpora using English and French as auxiliary languages show that this approach can yield dramatic improvements in performance (e.g. MRR improves by 124% to 0.419 for Telugu-Kannada). A user study on WikiTSu, a system for cross-lingual Wikipedia title suggestion that uses our approach, shows a 20% improvement in the quality of titles suggested.