Towards the First Named Entity Recognition of Inuktitut for an Improved Machine Translation
Ngoc Tan Le, Soumia Kasdi, Fatiha Sadat · 2023
Named Entity Recognition is a crucial step to ensure good quality performance of several Natural Language Processing applications and tools, including machine translation and information retrieval.Moreover, it is considered as a fundamental module of many Natural Language Understanding tasks such as questionanswering systems.This paper presents a first study on NER for an under-represented Indigenous Inuit language of Canada, Inuktitut, which lacks linguistic resources and large labeled data.Our proposed NER model for Inuktitut is built by transferring linguistic characteristics from English to Inuktitut, based on either rules or bilingual word embeddings.We provide an empirical study based on a comparison with the state of the art models and as well as intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations.In terms of Recall, Precision and F-score, the obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed NER methods.Furthermore, it improved the performance of Inuktitut-English Neural Machine Translation.