Unity in Diversity: A Unified Parsing Strategy for Major Indian Languages

This paper presents our work to apply non linear neural network for parsing five r esource p oor I ndian L anguages belonging to two major language families Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. Bengali and Marathi are Indo-Aryan languages whereas Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam belong to the Dravidian family. While little work has been done previously on Bengali and Telugu linear transition-based parsing, we present one of the first parsers for Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam. All the Indian languages are free word order and range from being moderate to very rich in morphology. Therefore in this work we propose the usage of linguistically motivated morphological features (suffix and postposition) in the non linear framework, to capture the intricacies of both the language families. We also capture chunk and gender, number, person information elegantly in this model. We put forward ways to represent these features cost effectively using monolingual distributed embeddings. Instead of relying on expensive morphological analyzers to extract the information, these embeddings are used effectively to increase parsing accuracies for resource poor languages. Our experiments provide a comparison between the two language families on the importance of varying morphological features. Part of speech taggers and chunkers for all languages are also built in the process.