An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Transformers for Arabic Information Extraction

Wuwei Lan, Yang Chen, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter


Abstract
Multilingual pre-trained Transformers, such as mBERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and XLM-RoBERTa (Conneau et al., 2020a), have been shown to enable effective cross-lingual zero-shot transfer. However, their performance on Arabic information extraction (IE) tasks is not very well studied. In this paper, we pre-train a customized bilingual BERT, dubbed GigaBERT, that is designed specifically for Arabic NLP and English-to-Arabic zero-shot transfer learning. We study GigaBERT’s effectiveness on zero-short transfer across four IE tasks: named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, argument role labeling, and relation extraction. Our best model significantly outperforms mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and AraBERT (Antoun et al., 2020) in both the supervised and zero-shot transfer settings. We have made our pre-trained models publicly available at: https://github.com/lanwuwei/GigaBERT.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.382
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4727–4734
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.382
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.382
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wuwei Lan, Yang Chen, Wei Xu, and Alan Ritter. 2020. An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Transformers for Arabic Information Extraction. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 4727–4734, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Transformers for Arabic Information Extraction (Lan et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2020.emnlp-main.382.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939107
Code
 lanwuwei/GigaBERT
Data
Panlex