Unveiling the Future: NLP Advancements for the Georgian Language

Short Summary

Progress in Developing Georgian Universal Dependencies

I recently had the opportunity to deliver a talk at Ilia State University, where I shared the latest advancements in developing Georgian Universal Dependencies. In this presentation, I highlighted the model’s performance, the accompanying dataset, and provided detailed insights into the ongoing progress.

Model Showcase

I showcased the Georgian Universal Dependencies model and discussed its performance, offering a comprehensive overview of the dataset we developed to support it.

Integrating with Stanza

Excitingly, I shared our plans to integrate the model with Stanza, the Stanford NLP library. This integration will result in the availability of Stanza for Georgian, contributing to the broader NLP community.

NLP Challenges and Competitions

Moving beyond the specifics of our work, I delved into broader NLP challenges, including classification, named entity recognition (NER), sentiment analysis, and more. I highlighted the perpetual competition between NLP benchmarks and the evolving models designed to surpass them, a driving force behind the development of cutting-edge language models.

Evolution of Word Embeddings

The journey of word embeddings was a focal point of discussion. Starting from simple one-hot encoding to sophisticated models like BERT and GPT, I explored the evolution of techniques such as TF-IDF, Word2Vec, RNNs (ELMo), and their respective pros and cons.

Resources for Georgian NLP

I provided insights into the available resources for Georgian NLP, discussing datasets, models, benchmarks, and the need to strive for the same level of performance achieved in English NLP.

Ongoing Initiatives

KALMO: Open Research Organization

I introduced KALMO, an open research organization founded in October 2023, comprising a team of fewer than 10 members, mainly from the ex-MaxinAI ML Team. The organization is actively working on collecting and publishing a Georgian Large Corpora to support NLP research.

Common Voice Project

I shared the progress of the Common Voice Project, which has made strides from 10 hours to 140 hours of speech data. This project is a valuable resource for enhancing speech-related NLP tasks.

AI Lab: English to Georgian Translation

Another noteworthy initiative is the “AI Lab,” an open research team focusing on English to Georgian translation. Led by a founder of PulsarAI, this team is actively contributing to language translation research.

Ilia State University Projects

I briefly touched upon ongoing projects at Ilia State University, including the development of Georgian Universal Dependencies and a Georgian OCR Benchmark.

Challenges in Open Sourcing Georgian Text Corpora

The conversation concluded with a discussion on the challenges of open-sourcing large text corpora in Georgian, emphasizing the stringent regulatory standards surrounding copyright laws.

In conclusion, it was both my pleasure and honor to be a part of this insightful conversation, and I look forward to the continued progress and collaboration within the NLP research community.