RI: Small: Collaborative Research: Statistical Learning of Language Universals

随着现代技术基础设施在世界各地的普及，以数百种不同语言编写的电子文本的数量在规模和多样性上继续增长。建立有效的跨多种语言的信息检索、提取和翻译系统目前需要对每种语言进行耗时且昂贵的语言注释。一般的、完全无监督的方法不太可能为这一问题提供独立于语言的解决方案。本项目以词性预测为重点，在不假设目标语言的任何特定知识的情况下，采用了一种新的方法，将监督和非监督学习的元素结合在一起。不是将单个语言视为封闭系统，而是从数十种存在已注释语料库的语言中统计估计与语言无关的共性，并使用这些已学习的共性来预测未注释语言的词性类别。该项目的核心是对独立于语言的语料库特征进行数据驱动的探索，这些特征将跨语言的语言类别与文本的表面统计联系起来。这些学习的模式被纳入到富有表现力的结构化预测模型中，使用该项目首席研究员开发的新的近似学习和推理方法。在世界上？S说的语言中，数百种面临立即灭绝的危险，还有数千种可能在未来几十年内消失。通过促进快速创建独立于语言的语言分析工具，该项目下开发的技术有可能彻底改变濒危语言的记录。从长远来看，这一研究方向还将通过为数百种低资源语言创建智能文本处理工具，帮助实现全球技术基础设施的全部社会效益。

As modern technology infrastructure spreads throughout the world, the quantity of electronic text, written in hundreds of different languages, continues to grow in size and diversity. Building effective information retrieval, extraction, and translation systems across this vast array of languages currently requires time-consuming and expensive linguistic annotations for each language. Generic, fully unsupervised, methods are unlikely to provide a language independent solution to this problem.Focusing on part-of-speech prediction, this project undertakes a novel approach, combining elements of supervised and unsupervised learning without assuming any specific knowledge of the target language. Instead of treating individual languages as closed systems, language-independent "universals" are statistically estimated from dozens of languages for which annotated corpora exist, and these learned universals are used to predict the part-of-speech categories of unannotated languages. At the heart of the project is a data-driven exploration of language-independent corpus characteristics that relate cross-lingual linguistic categories to surface statistics of text. These learned patterns are incorporated into expressive structured prediction models using novel approximate learning and inference methods developed by the Principal Investigators of the project.Of the world?s spoken languages, hundreds are at risk of immediate extinction and thousands more are likely to disappear over the coming decades. By facilitating the rapid creation of language-independent linguistic analysis tools, the technology developed under this project has the potential to revolutionize the documentation of endangered languages. In the long-term, this research direction will also help realize the full social benefits of the global technology infrastructure by creating intelligent text processing tools for hundreds of low-resource languages.