Shallow Parsing for Nepal Bhasa Complement Clauses

Accelerating the process of data collection, annotation, and analysis is an urgent need for linguistic fieldwork and documentation of endangered languages (Bird, 2009). Our experiments describe how we maximize the quality for the Nepal Bhasa syntactic complement structure chunking model. Native speaker language consultants were trained to annotate a minimally selected raw data set (Suarez et al, 2019). Embedded clauses, matrix verbs, and embedded verbs were annotated. We apply both statistical training algorithms and transfer learning in our training, including Naive Bayes, MaxEnt, and fine-tuning the pre-trained mBERT model (Devlin et al, 2018). We show that with limited annotated data, the model is already sufficient for the task. The modeling resources we used are largely available for many other endangered languages. The practice is easy to duplicate for training a shallow parser for other endangered languages.