Unsupervised Parts-of-Speech Induction for Bengali

  • Joydeep Nath ,
  • Monojit Choudhury ,
  • Animesh Mukherjee ,
  • Christian Biemann ,
  • Niloy Ganguly

Proceedings of LREC 2008 |

Published by European Language Resources Association

We present a study of the word interaction networks of Bengali in the framework of complex networks. The topological properties of these networks reveal interesting insights into the morpho-syntax of the language, whereas clustering helps in the induction of the natural word classes leading to a principled way of designing POS tagsets. We compare different network construction techniques and clustering algorithms based on the cohesiveness of the word clusters. Cohesiveness is measured against two gold-standard tagsets by means of the novel metric of tag-entropy. The approach presented here is a generic one that can be easily extended to any language.