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The need to capture intra-word information in natural language processing (NLP) tasks has inspired research in learning various word representations at word, character, or morpheme levels, but little attention has been given to syllables from a syllabic alphabet. Motivated by the success of compositional models in morphological languages, we present a Convolutional-long short term memory (Conv-LSTM) model for constructing Swahili word representation vectors from syllables. The unified architecture addresses the word agglutination and polysemous nature of Swahili by extracting high-level syllable features using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and then composes quality word embeddings with a long short term memory (LSTM). The word embeddings are then validated using a syllable-aware language model ( 31.267 ) and a part-of-speech (POS) tagging task ( 98.78 ), both yielding very competitive results to the state-of-art models in their respective domains. We further validate the language model using Xhosa and Shona, which are syllabic-based languages. The novelty of the study is in its capability to construct quality word embeddings from syllables using a hybrid model that does not use max-over-pool common in CNN and then the exploitation of these embeddings in POS tagging. Therefore, the study plays a crucial role in the processing of agglutinative and syllabic-based languages by contributing quality word embeddings from syllable embeddings, a robust Conv–LSTM model that learns syllables for not only language modeling and POS tagging, but also for other downstream NLP tasks.

Deep learning has extensively been used in natural language processing with sub-word representation vectors playing a critical role. However, this cannot be said of Swahili, which is a low resource and widely spoken language in East and Central Africa. This study proposed novel word embeddings from syllable embeddings (WEFSE) for Swahili to address the concern of word representation for agglutinative and syllabic-based languages. Inspired by the learning methodology of Swahili in beginner classes, we encoded respective syllables instead of characters, character n-grams or morphemes of words and generated quality word embeddings using a convolutional neural network. The quality of WEFSE was demonstrated by the state-of-art results in the syllable-aware language model on both the small dataset (31.229 perplexity value) and the medium dataset (45.859 perplexity value), outperforming character-aware language models. We further evaluated the word embeddings using word analogy task. To the best of our knowledge, syllabic alphabets have not been used to compose the word representation vectors. Therefore, the main contributions of the study are a syllabic alphabet, WEFSE, a syllabic-aware language model and a word analogy dataset for Swahili.