Programme booklet (pdf)

66
CLIN 21 – CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Technology recycling for closely related languages: Dutch
and Afrikaans
Abstract
Pilon, Suléne 1 and Van Huyssteen, Gerhard 2
1 North-West University (VTC)
2 North-West University (PC)
If two languages (L1 and L2) are similar enough, the development of technologies for
L2 can be expedited by recycling existing L1 resources. This process is called technology
recycling and the success thereof is greatly dependent on the degree of similarity
between the two languages in question. Other strategies can, however, be employed
to improve the efficiency of L1 technologies on L2 data and in this research we
experiment with one such strategy, viz. lexical conversion as pre-processing step. We
explore the possibility of using rule-based lexical conversion to improve the accuracy of
Dutch technologies when annotating Afrikaans data. The rationale here is that Dutch
technologies should perform better on Afrikaans data that appears more Dutch-like,
even if the conversion does not yield a good Dutch translation. To do the lexical
conversion, we developed an Afrikaans to Dutch convertor (A2DC) which obtains an
accuracy of more than 72% when converting Afrikaans words to Dutch. For our
experiment we use a state of the art Dutch POS tagger and parser to annotate raw
Afrikaans data. The same data is then converted with A2DC and once again annotated
with the Dutch technologies. In both experiments the conversion has a notably positive
effect on the performance of the Dutch technologies. The biggest difference is
observed in the POS tagging task with the overall accuracy increasing from 62.6% when
annotating raw Afrikaans data to 80.6% when annotating converted data, while the
parsing f-score improves from 0.44 (raw data) to more than 0.68 (converted data).
Corresponding author: sulene.pilon@nwu.ac.za