A Bambara Tonalization System for Word Sense Disambiguation Using Differential Coding, Segmentation and Edit Operation Filtering

AbstractIn many languages such as Bambara or Arabic, tone markers (diacritics) may be written but are actually often omitted. NLP applications are confronted to ambiguities and subsequent difficulties when processing texts. To circumvent this problem, tonalization may be used, as a word sense disambiguation task, relying on context to add diacritics that partially disambiguate words as well as senses. In this paper, we describe our implementation of a Bambara tonalizer that adds tone markers using machine learning (CRFs). To make our tool efficient, we used differential coding, word segmentation and edit operation filtering. We describe our approach that allows tractable machine learning and improves accuracy: our model may be learned within minutes on a 358K-word corpus and reaches 92.3% accuracy.