Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing with Unlabeled Auxiliary Languages

Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng


Abstract
Cross-lingual transfer learning has become an important weapon to battle the unavailability of annotated resources for low-resource languages. One of the fundamental techniques to transfer across languages is learning language-agnostic representations, in the form of word embeddings or contextual encodings. In this work, we propose to leverage unannotated sentences from auxiliary languages to help learning language-agnostic representations. Specifically, we explore adversarial training for learning contextual encoders that produce invariant representations across languages to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. We conduct experiments on cross-lingual dependency parsing where we train a dependency parser on a source language and transfer it to a wide range of target languages. Experiments on 28 target languages demonstrate that adversarial training significantly improves the overall transfer performances under several different settings. We conduct a careful analysis to evaluate the language-agnostic representations resulted from adversarial training.
Anthology ID:
K19-1035
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
372–382
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1035
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1035
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng. 2019. Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing with Unlabeled Auxiliary Languages. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 372–382, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing with Unlabeled Auxiliary Languages (Ahmad et al., CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/K19-1035.pdf
Code
 wasiahmad/cross_lingual_parsing
Data
Universal Dependencies