Are Girls Neko or Shōjo? Cross-Lingual Alignment of Non-Isomorphic Embeddings with Iterative Normalization

Mozhi Zhang, Keyulu Xu, Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi, Stefanie Jegelka, Jordan Boyd-Graber


Abstract
Cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE) underlie many multilingual natural language processing systems, often through orthogonal transformations of pre-trained monolingual embeddings. However, orthogonal mapping only works on language pairs whose embeddings are naturally isomorphic. For non-isomorphic pairs, our method (Iterative Normalization) transforms monolingual embeddings to make orthogonal alignment easier by simultaneously enforcing that (1) individual word vectors are unit length, and (2) each language’s average vector is zero. Iterative Normalization consistently improves word translation accuracy of three CLWE methods, with the largest improvement observed on English-Japanese (from 2% to 44% test accuracy).
Anthology ID:
P19-1307
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3180–3189
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1307
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1307
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mozhi Zhang, Keyulu Xu, Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi, Stefanie Jegelka, and Jordan Boyd-Graber. 2019. Are Girls Neko or Shōjo? Cross-Lingual Alignment of Non-Isomorphic Embeddings with Iterative Normalization. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3180–3189, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are Girls Neko or Shōjo? Cross-Lingual Alignment of Non-Isomorphic Embeddings with Iterative Normalization (Zhang et al., ACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/P19-1307.pdf