Singlish, or formally Colloquial Singapore English, is an English-based creole language originating from the SouthEast Asian country Singapore. The language contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Chinese dialects, Malay, Tamil and so forth. A fundamental task to understanding Singlish is to first understand the pragmatic functions of its discourse particles, upon which Singlish relies heavily to convey meaning. This work offers a preliminary effort to disentangle the Singlish discourse particles (lah, meh and hor) with task-driven representation learning. After disentanglement, we cluster these discourse particles to differentiate their pragmatic functions, and perform Singlish-to-English machine translation. Our work provides a computational method to understanding Singlish discourse particles, and opens avenues towards a deeper comprehension of the language and its usage.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.20366,
title = {Disentangling Singlish Discourse Particles with Task-Driven Representation},
author = {Linus Tze En Foo and Lynnette Hui Xian Ng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.20366},
year = {2024}
}