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Expanding N-grams for Code-Switch Language Models

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Book cover Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2018 (AISI 2018)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 845))

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Abstract

It has become common, especially among urban youth, for people to use more than one language in their everyday conversations - a phenomenon referred to by linguists as “code-switching”. With the rise in globalization and the widespread of code-switching among multilingual societies, a great demand has been placed on Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications to be able to handle such mixed data. In this paper, we present our efforts in language modeling for code-switch Arabic-English. In order to train a language model (LM), huge amounts of text data is required in the respective language. However, the main challenge faced in language modeling for code-switch languages, is the lack of available data. In this paper, we propose an approach to artificially generate code-switch Arabic-English n-grams and thus improve the language model. This was done by expanding the relatively-small available corpus and its corresponding n-grams using translation-based approaches. The final LM achieved relative improvements in both perplexity and OOV rates of 1.97% and 16.36% respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The German University in Cairo, El Tagamoa El Khames, New Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

    Injy Hamed, Mohamed Elmahdy & Slim Abdennadher

Authors
  1. Injy Hamed
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  2. Mohamed Elmahdy
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  3. Slim Abdennadher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Injy Hamed .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Technology Department, Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

    Aboul Ella Hassanien

  2. Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

    Mohamed F. Tolba

  3. Dubai International Academic City, The British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Khaled Shaalan

  4. Faculty of Computers and Information, Benha University, Benha, Egypt

    Ahmad Taher Azar

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Hamed, I., Elmahdy, M., Abdennadher, S. (2019). Expanding N-grams for Code-Switch Language Models. In: Hassanien, A., Tolba, M., Shaalan, K., Azar, A. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems and Informatics 2018. AISI 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 845. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99010-1_20

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