Cross Language POS Taggers (and other Tools) for Indian Languages: An Experiment with Kannada using Telugu Resources
Siva Reddy, Serge Sharoff · 2011
Indian languages are known to have a large speaker base, yet some of these languages have minimal or non-efficient linguistic resources. For example, Kannada is relatively resource-poor compared to Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu, which in-turn are relatively poor compared to Hindi. Many Indian language pairs exhibit high similarities in morphology and syntactic behaviour e.g. Kannada is highly similar to Telugu. In this paper, we show how to build a cross-language part-of-speech tagger for Kannada exploiting the resources of Telugu. We also build large corpora and a morphological analyser (including lemmatisation) for Kannada. Our experiments reveal that a cross-language taggers are as efficient as mono-lingual taggers. We aim to extend our work to other Indian languages. Our tools are efficient and significantly faster than the existing monolingual tools.