Browsing by Author "Abdullahi, Muhammad"

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    MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages
    (arXiv preprint arXiv, 2023-05-23) Dione, Cheikh M. Bamba; Nabende, Peter; Mukiibi, Jonathan; Chinedu Uchechukwu; Uchechukwu, Chinedu; Abdullahi, Muhammad; Klakow, Dietrich
    In this paper, we present MasakhaPOS, the largest part-of-speech (POS) dataset for 20 typologically diverse African languages. We discuss the challenges in annotating POS for these languages using the UD (universal dependencies) guidelines. We conducted extensive POS baseline experiments using conditional random field and several multilingual pretrained language models. We applied various cross-lingual transfer models trained with data available in UD. Evaluating on the Masakha- POS dataset, we show that choosing the best transfer language(s) in both single-source and multi-source setups greatly improves the POS tagging performance of the target languages, in particular when combined with cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Crucially, transferring knowledge from a language that matches the language family and morphosyntactic properties seems more effective for POS tagging in unseen languages.