BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages

Joseph Marvin Imperial; Ekaterina Kochmar

doi:10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.388

BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages

Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ekaterina Kochmar

Research output: Chapter or section in a book/report/conference proceeding › Chapter in a published conference proceeding

Abstract

Current research on automatic readability assessment (ARA) has focused on improving the performance of models in high-resource languages such as English. In this work, we introduce and release BASAHACORPUS as part of an initiative aimed at expanding available corpora and baseline models for readability assessment in lower resource languages in the Philippines. We compiled a corpus of short fictional narratives written in Hiligaynon, Minasbate, Karay-a, and Rinconada-languages belonging to the Central Philippine family tree subgroup-to train ARA models using surface-level, syllable-pattern, and n-gram overlap features. We also propose a new hierarchical cross-lingual modeling approach that takes advantage of a language's placement in the family tree to increase the amount of available training data. Our study yields encouraging results that support previous work showcasing the efficacy of cross-lingual models in low-resource settings, as well as similarities in highly informative linguistic features for mutually intelligible languages.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Editors	Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Place of Publication	Texas, U. S. A.
Publisher	Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages	6302-6309
Number of pages	8
ISBN (Electronic)	9798891760608
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.388
Publication status	Published - 31 Dec 2023
Event	2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023 - Hybrid, Singapore, Singapore Duration: 6 Dec 2023 → 10 Dec 2023

Conference

Conference	2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023
Country/Territory	Singapore
City	Hybrid, Singapore
Period	6/12/23 → 10/12/23

Funding

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and the ACs, SACs, and PCs for their appreciation of this work. We also thank the community translators and maintainers of the online library of Let’s Read Asia for keeping the digital resources in the Philippine languages freely available for everyone. JMI is supported by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Accountable, Responsible, and Transparent AI (ART-AI) [EP/S023437/1] of the University of Bath and by the Study Grant Program of National University Philippines.

Funders	Funder number
National University, Philippines
UK Research and Innovation	EP/S023437/1
University of Bath

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computational Theory and Mathematics
Computer Science Applications
Information Systems
Linguistics and Language

Access to Document

10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.388Licence: CC BY

Cite this

Imperial, J. M., & Kochmar, E. (2023). BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages. In H. Bouamor, J. Pino, & K. Bali (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 6302-6309). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.388

BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages. / Imperial, Joseph Marvin; Kochmar, Ekaterina.
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. ed. / Houda Bouamor; Juan Pino; Kalika Bali. Texas, U. S. A.: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. p. 6302-6309.

Research output: Chapter or section in a book/report/conference proceeding › Chapter in a published conference proceeding

Imperial, JM & Kochmar, E 2023, BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages. in H Bouamor, J Pino & K Bali (eds), Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Texas, U. S. A., pp. 6302-6309, 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023, Hybrid, Singapore, Singapore, 6/12/23. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.388

Imperial JM, Kochmar E. BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages. In Bouamor H, Pino J, Bali K, editors, Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Texas, U. S. A.: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2023. p. 6302-6309 doi: 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.388

Imperial, Joseph Marvin ; Kochmar, Ekaterina. / BasahaCorpus : An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. editor / Houda Bouamor ; Juan Pino ; Kalika Bali. Texas, U. S. A. : Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023. pp. 6302-6309

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BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages

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