Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an action research area in the digital age. With rapid and constant growth of online social media sites and services, and the increasing amount of textual data such as - statuses, comments, reviews etc. available in them, application of automatic SA is on the rise. However, most of the research works on SA in natural language processing (NLP) are based on English language. Despite being the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, Bangla still does not have a large and standard dataset. Because of this, recent research works in Bangla have failed to produce results that can be both comparable to works done by others and reusable as stepping stones for future researchers to progress in this field. Therefore, we first tried to provide a textual dataset - that includes not just Bangla, but Romanized Bangla texts as well, is substantial, post-processed and multiple validated, ready to be used in SA experiments. We tested this dataset in Deep Recurrent model, specifically, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), using two types of loss functions - binary crossentropy and categorical crossentropy, and also did some experimental pre-training by using data from one validation to pre-train the other and vice versa. Lastly, we documented the results along with some analysis on them, which were promising.

In this study, the problem of shallow parsing of Hindi-English code-mixed social media text (CSMT) has been addressed. We have annotated the data, developed a language identifier, a normalizer, a part-of-speech tagger and a shallow parser. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to attempt shallow parsing on CSMT. The pipeline developed has been made available to the research community with the goal of enabling better text analysis of Hindi English CSMT. The pipeline is accessible at http://bit.ly/csmt-parser-api .

Text detection and segmentation is an important prerequisite for many content based image analysis tasks. The paper proposes a novel text extraction and character segmentation algorithm using Maximally Stable Extremal Regions as basic letter candidates. These regions are then subjected to thresholding and thereafter various connected components are determined to identify separate characters. The algorithm is tested along a set of various JPEG, PNG and BMP images over four different character sets; English, Russian, Hindi and Urdu. The algorithm gives good results for English and Russian character set; however character segmentation in Urdu and Hindi language is not much accurate. The algorithm is simple, efficient, involves no overhead as required in training and gives good results for even low quality images. The paper also proposes various challenges in text extraction and segmentation for multilingual inputs.

Sentiment analysis (SA) using code-mixed data from social media has several applications in opinion mining ranging from customer satisfaction to social campaign analysis in multilingual societies. Advances in this area are impeded by the lack of a suitable annotated dataset. We introduce a Hindi-English (Hi-En) code-mixed dataset for sentiment analysis and perform empirical analysis comparing the suitability and performance of various state-of-the-art SA methods in social media. In this paper, we introduce learning sub-word level representations in LSTM (Subword-LSTM) architecture instead of character-level or word-level representations. This linguistic prior in our architecture enables us to learn the information about sentiment value of important morphemes. This also seems to work well in highly noisy text containing misspellings as shown in our experiments which is demonstrated in morpheme-level feature maps learned by our model. Also, we hypothesize that encoding this linguistic prior in the Subword-LSTM architecture leads to the superior performance. Our system attains accuracy 4-5% greater than traditional approaches on our dataset, and also outperforms the available system for sentiment analysis in Hi-En code-mixed text by 18%.

We present research towards bridging the language gap between migrant workers in Qatar and medical staff. In particular, we present the first steps towards the development of a real-world Hindi-English machine translation system for doctor-patient communication. As this is a low-resource language pair, especially for speech and for the medical domain, our initial focus has been on gathering suitable training data from various sources. We applied a variety of methods ranging from fully automatic extraction from the Web to manual annotation of test data. Moreover, we developed a method for automatically augmenting the training data with synthetically generated variants, which yielded a very sizable improvement of more than 3 BLEU points absolute.

Text-to-Speech synthesis in Indian languages has a seen lot of progress over the decade partly due to the annual Blizzard challenges. These systems assume the text to be written in Devanagari or Dravidian scripts which are nearly phonemic orthography scripts. However, the most common form of computer interaction among Indians is ASCII written transliterated text. Such text is generally noisy with many variations in spelling for the same word. In this paper we evaluate three approaches to synthesize speech from such noisy ASCII text: a naive Uni-Grapheme approach, a Multi-Grapheme approach, and a supervised Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) approach. These methods first convert the ASCII text to a phonetic script, and then learn a Deep Neural Network to synthesize speech from that. We train and test our models on Blizzard Challenge datasets that were transliterated to ASCII using crowdsourcing. Our experiments on Hindi, Tamil and Telugu demonstrate that our models generate speech of competetive quality from ASCII text compared to the speech synthesized from the native scripts. All the accompanying transliterated datasets are released for public access.

This paper describes Centre for Development of Advanced Computing's (CDACM) submission to the shared task-'Tool Contest on POS tagging for Code-Mixed Indian Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp) Text', collocated with ICON-2016. The shared task was to predict Part of Speech (POS) tag at word level for a given text. The code-mixed text is generated mostly on social media by multilingual users. The presence of the multilingual words, transliterations, and spelling variations make such content linguistically complex. In this paper, we propose an approach to POS tag code-mixed social media text using Recurrent Neural Network Language Model (RNN-LM) architecture. We submitted the results for Hindi-English (hi-en), Bengali-English (bn-en), and Telugu-English (te-en) code-mixed data.

This paper discusses the experiments carried out by us at Jadavpur University as part of the participation in ICON 2015 task: POS Tagging for Code-mixed Indian Social Media Text. The tool that we have developed for the task is based on Trigram Hidden Markov Model that utilizes information from dictionary as well as some other word level features to enhance the observation probabilities of the known tokens as well as unknown tokens. We submitted runs for Bengali-English, Hindi-English and Tamil-English Language pairs. Our system has been trained and tested on the datasets released for ICON 2015 shared task: POS Tagging For Code-mixed Indian Social Media Text. In constrained mode, our system obtains average overall accuracy (averaged over all three language pairs) of 75.60% which is very close to other participating two systems (76.79% for IIITH and 75.79% for AMRITA_CEN) ranked higher than our system. In unconstrained mode, our system obtains average overall accuracy of 70.65% which is also close to the system (72.85% for AMRITA_CEN) which obtains the highest average overall accuracy.

Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) has become an important problem to solve in the recent years due to the growth of content in multiple languages in the Web. One of the standard methods is to use query translation from source to target language. In this paper, we propose an approach based on word embeddings, a method that captures contextual clues for a particular word in the source language and gives those words as translations that occur in a similar context in the target language. Once we obtain the word embeddings of the source and target language pairs, we learn a projection from source to target word embeddings, making use of a dictionary with word translation pairs.We then propose various methods of query translation and aggregation. The advantage of this approach is that it does not require the corpora to be aligned (which is difficult to obtain for resource-scarce languages), a dictionary with word translation pairs is enough to train the word vectors for translation. We experiment with Forum for Information Retrieval and Evaluation (FIRE) 2008 and 2012 datasets for Hindi to English CLIR. The proposed word embedding based approach outperforms the basic dictionary based approach by 70% and when the word embeddings are combined with the dictionary, the hybrid approach beats the baseline dictionary based method by 77%. It outperforms the English monolingual baseline by 15%, when combined with the translations obtained from Google Translate and Dictionary.

This paper presents Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Mumbai's (CDACM) submission to the NLP Tools Contest on Part-Of-Speech (POS) Tagging For Code-mixed Indian Social Media Text (POSCMISMT) 2015 (collocated with ICON 2015). We submitted results for Hindi (hi), Bengali (bn), and Telugu (te) languages mixed with English (en). In this paper, we have described our approaches to the POS tagging techniques, we exploited for this task. Machine learning has been used to POS tag the mixed language text. For POS tagging, distributed representations of words in vector space (word2vec) for feature extraction and Log-linear models have been tried. We report our work on all three languages hi, bn, and te mixed with en.