@inproceedings{shi-etal-2019-learning,
    title = "Learning Bilingual Word Embeddings Using Lexical Definitions",
    author = "Shi, Weijia  and
      Chen, Muhao  and
      Tian, Yingtao  and
      Chang, Kai-Wei",
    editor = "Augenstein, Isabelle  and
      Gella, Spandana  and
      Ruder, Sebastian  and
      Kann, Katharina  and
      Can, Burcu  and
      Welbl, Johannes  and
      Conneau, Alexis  and
      Ren, Xiang  and
      Rei, Marek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2019)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/W19-4316/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W19-4316",
    pages = "142--147",
    abstract = "Bilingual word embeddings, which represent lexicons of different languages in a shared embedding space, are essential for supporting semantic and knowledge transfers in a variety of cross-lingual NLP tasks. Existing approaches to training bilingual word embeddings require either large collections of pre-defined seed lexicons that are expensive to obtain, or parallel sentences that comprise coarse and noisy alignment. In contrast, we propose BiLex that leverages publicly available lexical definitions for bilingual word embedding learning. Without the need of predefined seed lexicons, BiLex comprises a novel word pairing strategy to automatically identify and propagate the precise fine-grain word alignment from lexical definitions. We evaluate BiLex in word-level and sentence-level translation tasks, which seek to find the cross-lingual counterparts of words and sentences respectively. BiLex significantly outperforms previous embedding methods on both tasks."
}