Zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) aims at transferring knowledge from annotated and rich-resource data in source languages to unlabeled and lean-resource data in target languages. Existing mainstream methods based on the teacher-student distillation framework ignore the rich and complementary information lying in the intermediate layers of pre-trained language models, and domain-invariant information is easily lost during transfer. In this study, a mixture of short-channel distillers (MSD) method is proposed to fully interact the rich hierarchical information in the teacher model and to transfer knowledge to the student model sufficiently and efficiently. Concretely, a multi-channel distillation framework is designed for sufficient information transfer by aggregating multiple distillers as a mixture. Besides, an unsupervised method adopting parallel domain adaptation is proposed to shorten the channels between the teacher and student models to preserve domain-invariant features. Experiments on four datasets across nine languages demonstrate that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot cross-lingual NER and shows great generalization and compatibility across languages and fields.

Semantic relation classification remains a challenge in natural language processing. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical recurrent neural network that is capable of extracting information from raw sentences for relation classification. Our model has several distinctive features: (1) Each sentence is divided into three context subsequences according to two annotated nominals, which allows the model to encode each context subsequence independently so as to selectively focus as on the important context information; (2) The hierarchical model consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNNs): the first one learns context representations of the three context subsequences respectively, and the second one computes semantic composition of these three representations and produces a sentence representation for the relationship classification of the two nominals. (3) The attention mechanism is adopted in both RNNs to encourage the model to concentrate on the important information when learning the sentence representations. Experimental results on the SemEval-2010 Task 8 dataset demonstrate that our model is comparable to the state-of-the-art without using any hand-crafted features.

Distributed word representation is an efficient method for capturing semantic and syntactic word relations. In this work, we introduce an extension to the continuous bag-of-words model for learning word representations efficiently by using implicit structure information. Instead of relying on a syntactic parser which might be noisy and slow to build, we compute weights representing probabilities of syntactic relations based on the Huffman softmax tree in an efficient heuristic. The constructed “implicit graphs” from these weights show that these weights contain useful implicit structure information. Extensive experiments performed on several word similarity and word analogy tasks show gains compared to the basic continuous bag-of-words model.

We describe an attentive encoder that combines tree-structured recursive neural networks and sequential recurrent neural networks for modelling sentence pairs. Since existing attentive models exert attention on the sequential structure, we propose a way to incorporate attention into the tree topology. Specially, given a pair of sentences, our attentive encoder uses the representation of one sentence, which generated via an RNN, to guide the structural encoding of the other sentence on the dependency parse tree. We evaluate the proposed attentive encoder on three tasks: semantic similarity, paraphrase identification and true-false question selection. Experimental results show that our encoder outperforms all baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on two tasks.