Diversifying language models for lesser-studied languages and language-usage contexts: A case of second language Korean

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which currently available morpheme parsers/taggers apply to lesser-studied languages and language-usage contexts, with a focus on second language (L2) Korean. We pursue this inquiry by (1) training a neural-network model (pre-trained on first language [L1] Korean data) on varying L2 datasets and (2) measuring its morpheme parsing/POS tagging performance on L2 test sets from both the same and different sources of the L2 train sets. Results show that the L2 trained models generally excel in domain-specific tokenization and POS tagging compared to the L1 pre-trained baseline model. Interestingly, increasing the size of the L2 training data does not lead to improving model performance consistently.