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.

翻译：新加坡英语，正式名称为新加坡口语英语，是一种起源于东南亚国家新加坡的以英语为基础的克里奥尔语。该语言受到汉语方言、马来语、泰米尔语等汉藏语系语言的影响。理解新加坡英语的一个基本任务是首先理解其话语助词的语用功能，新加坡英语在很大程度上依赖这些助词来传达意义。本研究通过任务驱动的表征学习，对新加坡英语话语助词（lah、meh和hor）进行了初步的解耦分析。解耦后，我们通过聚类这些话语助词来区分其语用功能，并进行了新加坡英语到英语的机器翻译。我们的工作为理解新加坡英语话语助词提供了一种计算方法，并为深入理解该语言及其使用开辟了新的途径。