HinDialect: 26 Hindi-related languages and dialects of the Indic Continuum in North India
Languages
This is a collection of folksongs for 26 languages that form a dialect continuum in North India and nearby regions.
Namely Angika, Awadhi, Baiga, Bengali, Bhadrawahi, Bhili, Bhojpuri, Braj, Bundeli, Chhattisgarhi, Garhwali, Gujarati, Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi, Kanauji, Khadi Boli, Korku, Kumaoni, Magahi, Malvi, Marathi, Nimadi, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit.
This data is originally collected by the Kavita Kosh Project at http://www.kavitakosh.org/ . Here are the main characteristics of the languages in this collection:
- They are all Indic languages except for Korku.
- The majority of them are closely related to the standard Hindi dialect genealogically (such as Hariyanvi and Bhojpuri), although the collection also contains languages such as Bengali and Gujarati which are more distant relatives.
- All except Nepali are primarily spoken in (North) India
- All except Sanksrit are alive languages
Data
Categorising them by pre-existing available NLP resources, we have:
* Band 1 languages : Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Bengali, Nepali. These languages already have other large datasets available. Since Kavita Kosh focusses largely on Hindi-related languages, we may have very little data for these other languages in this particular dataset.
* Band 2 languages: Bhojpuri, Magahi, Awadhi, Brajbhasha. These languages have growing interest and some datasets of a relatively small size as compared to Band 1 language resources.
* Band 3 languages: All other languages in the collection are previously zero-resource languages. These are the languages for which this dataset is the most relevant.
Script
This dataset is entirely in Devanagari. Content in the case of languages not written in Devanagari (such as Bengali and Gujarati) has been transliterated by the Kavita Kosh Project.
Format
The data is segregated by language, and contains each folksong in a different JSON file.
Hindi monolingual corpus. It is based primarily on web crawls performed using various tools and at various times. Since the web is a living data source, we treat these crawls as completely separate sources, despite they may overlap. To estimate the magnitude of this overlap, we compared the total number of segments if we concatenate the individual sources (each source being deduplicated on its own) with the number of segments if we de-duplicate all sources to- gether. The difference is just around 1%, confirming, that various web crawls (or their subsequent processings) differ significantly.
HindMonoCorp contains data from:
Hindi web texts, a monolingual corpus containing mainly Hindi news articles has already been collected and released by Bojar et al. (2008). We use the HTML files as crawled for this corpus in 2010 and we add a small crawl performed in 2013 and re-process them with the current pipeline. These sources are denoted HWT 2010 and HWT 2013 in the following.
Hindi corpora in W2C have been collected by Martin Majliš during his project to automatically collect corpora in many languages (Majliš and Žabokrtský, 2012). There are in fact two corpora of Hindi available—one from web harvest (W2C Web) and one from the Wikipedia (W2C Wiki).
SpiderLing is a web crawl carried out during November and December 2013 using SpiderLing (Suchomel and Pomikálek, 2012). The pipeline includes extraction of plain texts and deduplication at the level of documents, see below.
CommonCrawl is a non-profit organization that regu- larly crawls the web and provides anyone with the data. We are grateful to Christian Buck for extracting plain text Hindi segments from the 2012 and 2013-fall crawls for us.
Intercorp – 7 books with their translations scanned and manually alligned per paragraph
RSS Feeds from Webdunia.com and the Hindi version of BBC International followed by our custom crawler from September 2013 till January 2014. and LM2010013,
The HMM-based Tagger is a software for morphological disambiguation (tagging) of Czech texts. The algorithm is statistical, based on the Hidden Markov Models.