Event extraction requires high-quality expert human annotations, which are usually expensive. Therefore, learning a data-efficient event extraction model that can be trained with only a few labeled examples has become a crucial challenge. In this paper, we focus on low-resource end-to-end event extraction and propose DEGREE, a data-efficient model that formulates event extraction as a conditional generation problem. Given a passage and a manually designed prompt, DEGREE learns to summarize the events mentioned in the passage into a natural sentence that follows a predefined pattern. The final event predictions are then extracted from the generated sentence with a deterministic algorithm. DEGREE has three advantages to learn well with less training data. First, our designed prompts provide semantic guidance for DEGREE to leverage DEGREE and thus better capture the event arguments. Moreover, DEGREE is capable of using additional weakly-supervised information, such as the description of events encoded in the prompts. Finally, DEGREE learns triggers and arguments jointly in an end-to-end manner, which encourages the model to better utilize the shared knowledge and dependencies among them. Our experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of DEGREE for low-resource event extraction.

We describe an approach to cross lingual information retrieval that does not rely on explicit translation of either document or query terms. Instead, both queries and documents are mapped into a shared embedding space where retrieval is performed. We discuss potential advantages of the approach in handling polysemy and synonymy. We present a method for training the model, and give details of the model implementation. We present experimental results for two cases: Somali-English and Bulgarian-English CLIR.

When performing cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) for lower-resourced languages, a common approach is to retrieve over the output of machine translation (MT). However, there is no established guidance on how to optimize the resulting MT-IR system. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the performance of MT systems and both neural and term frequency-based IR models to identify how CLIR performance can be best predicted from MT quality. We explore performance at varying amounts of MT training data, byte pair encoding (BPE) merge operations, and across two IR collections and retrieval models. We find that the choice of IR collection can substantially affect the predictive power of MT tuning decisions and evaluation, potentially introducing dissociations between MT-only and overall CLIR performance.

Entities, which refer to distinct objects in the real world, can be viewed as language universals and used as effective signals to generate less ambiguous semantic representations and align multiple languages. We propose a novel method, CLEW, to generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia. We replace each anchor link in the source language with its corresponding entity title in the target language if it exists, or in the source language otherwise. A cross-lingual joint entity and word embedding learned from this kind of data not only can disambiguate linkable entities but can also effectively represent unlinkable entities. Because this multilingual common space directly relates the semantics of contextual words in the source language to that of entities in the target language, we leverage it for unsupervised cross-lingual entity linking. Experimental results show that CLEW significantly advances the state-of-the-art: up to 3.1% absolute F-score gain for unsupervised cross-lingual entity linking. Moreover, it provides reliable alignment on both the word/entity level and the sentence level, and thus we use it to mine parallel sentences for all (302, 2) language pairs in Wikipedia.

With the increasing democratization of electronic media, vast information resources are available in less-frequently-taught languages such as Swahili or Somali. That information, which may be crucially important and not available elsewhere, can be difficult for monolingual English speakers to effectively access. In this paper we present an end-to-end cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) and summarization system for low-resource languages that 1) enables English speakers to search foreign language repositories of text and audio using English queries, 2) summarizes the retrieved documents in English with respect to a particular information need, and 3) provides complete transcriptions and translations as needed. The SARAL system achieved the top end-to-end performance in the most recent IARPA MATERIAL CLIR+summarization evaluations. Our demonstration system provides end-to-end open query retrieval and summarization capability, and presents the original source text or audio, speech transcription, and machine translation, for two low resource languages.

Computer Assisted Discovery Extraction and Translation (CADET) is a workbench for helping knowledge workers find, label, and translate documents of interest. It combines a multitude of analytics together with a flexible environment for customizing the workflow for different users. This open-source framework allows for easy development of new research prototypes using a micro-service architecture based atop Docker and Apache Thrift.

We describe a unified and coherent syntactic framework for supporting a semantically-informed syntactic approach to statistical machine translation. Semantically enriched syntactic tags assigned to the target-language training texts improved translation quality. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English translation task. This finding supports the hypothesis (posed by many researchers in the MT community, e.g., in DARPA GALE) that both syntactic and semantic information are critical for improving translation quality—and further demonstrates that large gains can be achieved for low-resource languages with different word order than English.