Cross-lingual Semantic Specialization via Lexical Relation Induction

Edoardo Maria Ponti, Ivan Vulić, Goran Glavaš, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen

Abstract
Semantic specialization integrates structured linguistic knowledge from external resources (such as lexical relations in WordNet) into pretrained distributional vectors in the form of constraints. However, this technique cannot be leveraged in many languages, because their structured external resources are typically incomplete or non-existent. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel method that transfers specialization from a resource-rich source language (English) to virtually any target language. Our specialization transfer comprises two crucial steps: 1) Inducing noisy constraints in the target language through automatic word translation; and 2) Filtering the noisy constraints via a state-of-the-art relation prediction model trained on the source language constraints. This allows us to specialize any set of distributional vectors in the target language with the refined constraints. We prove the effectiveness of our method through intrinsic word similarity evaluation in 8 languages, and with 3 downstream tasks in 5 languages: lexical simplification, dialog state tracking, and semantic textual similarity. The gains over the previous state-of-art specialization methods are substantial and consistent across languages. Our results also suggest that the transfer method is effective even for lexically distant source-target language pairs. Finally, as a by-product, our method produces lists of WordNet-style lexical relations in resource-poor languages.
Anthology ID:
D19-1226
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2206–2217
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1226
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1226
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Edoardo Maria Ponti, Ivan Vulić, Goran Glavaš, Roi Reichart, and Anna Korhonen. 2019. Cross-lingual Semantic Specialization via Lexical Relation Induction. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2206–2217, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Semantic Specialization via Lexical Relation Induction (Ponti et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/D19-1226.pdf
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