Adversarial Multitask Learning for Joint Multi-Feature and Multi-Dialect Morphological Modeling

Nasser Zalmout, Nizar Habash


Abstract
Morphological tagging is challenging for morphologically rich languages due to the large target space and the need for more training data to minimize model sparsity. Dialectal variants of morphologically rich languages suffer more as they tend to be more noisy and have less resources. In this paper we explore the use of multitask learning and adversarial training to address morphological richness and dialectal variations in the context of full morphological tagging. We use multitask learning for joint morphological modeling for the features within two dialects, and as a knowledge-transfer scheme for cross-dialectal modeling. We use adversarial training to learn dialect invariant features that can help the knowledge-transfer scheme from the high to low-resource variants. We work with two dialectal variants: Modern Standard Arabic (high-resource “dialect’”) and Egyptian Arabic (low-resource dialect) as a case study. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results for both. Furthermore, adversarial training provides more significant improvement when using smaller training datasets in particular.
Anthology ID:
P19-1173
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1775–1786
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1173
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1173
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nasser Zalmout and Nizar Habash. 2019. Adversarial Multitask Learning for Joint Multi-Feature and Multi-Dialect Morphological Modeling. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1775–1786, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adversarial Multitask Learning for Joint Multi-Feature and Multi-Dialect Morphological Modeling (Zalmout & Habash, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/P19-1173.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/384512599