Retrieving Relevant Context to Align Representations for Cross-lingual Event Detection

Chien Nguyen, Linh Ngo, Thien Nguyen


Abstract
We study the problem of cross-lingual transfer learning for event detection (ED) where models trained on a source language are expected to perform well on data for a new target language. Among a few recent works for this problem, the main approaches involve representation matching (e.g., adversarial training) that aims to eliminate language-specific features from the representations to achieve the language-invariant representations. However, due to the mix of language-specific features with event-discriminative context, representation matching methods might also remove important features for event prediction, thus hindering the performance for ED. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach for cross-lingual ED where representations are augmented with additional context (i.e., not eliminating) to bridge the gap between languages while enriching the contextual information to facilitate ED. At the core of our method involves a retrieval model that retrieves relevant sentences in the target language for an input sentence to compute augmentation representations. Experiments on three languages demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our model for cross-lingual ED.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.135
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2157–2170
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.135
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.135
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chien Nguyen, Linh Ngo, and Thien Nguyen. 2023. Retrieving Relevant Context to Align Representations for Cross-lingual Event Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 2157–2170, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieving Relevant Context to Align Representations for Cross-lingual Event Detection (Nguyen et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2023.findings-acl.135.pdf