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Can anyone chime in to how Chinese NLP compares? I speak Mandarin as a second language at an intermediate level, and from my perspective it has some interesting

Can anyone chime in to how Chinese NLP compares? I speak Mandarin as a second language at an intermediate level, and from my perspective it has some interesting properties compared to English (my native language) that seem like they might make NLP easier in ways that English NLP might be hard: - The grammar for standard Mandarin is much simpler than English. No verb conjugations or strange tense rules ("go" -> "went")! - Tense and even voice are explicit and additive - i.e. adding "呢" or "吧" to a sentence. - Written, it seems less ambiguous. i.e. "duck" or "grave" have different meanings in English based on context, but that seems much much rarer in Chinese - two words spoken the same way but with different meanings usually have different written forms.

Tainnor 6y ago
Mandarin has even less morphology than English[1], so to some extent, working on Mandarin would not "fix" some of the issues of NLP models often performing poorly on morphology-rich languages. But it's possible that focusing more on Mandarin would still lead to improvements in other areas, because the two languages are otherwise quite different (I wonder how well speech recognition works for tonal languages, for example?). [1] Possibly not without reason: there is some indication that languages spoken by a large number of speakers tend to become structurally simpler, while very small isolated languages can often develop surprising complexity.