Hanan Aldarmaki


2022

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Supervised Acoustic Embeddings And Their Transferability Across Languages
Sreepratha Ram | Hanan Aldarmaki
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2022)

2019

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Context-Aware Cross-Lingual Mapping
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Cross-lingual word vectors are typically obtained by fitting an orthogonal matrix that maps the entries of a bilingual dictionary from a source to a target vector space. Word vectors, however, are most commonly used for sentence or document-level representations that are calculated as the weighted average of word embeddings. In this paper, we propose an alternative to word-level mapping that better reflects sentence-level cross-lingual similarity. We incorporate context in the transformation matrix by directly mapping the averaged embeddings of aligned sentences in a parallel corpus. We also implement cross-lingual mapping of deep contextualized word embeddings using parallel sentences with word alignments. In our experiments, both approaches resulted in cross-lingual sentence embeddings that outperformed context-independent word mapping in sentence translation retrieval. Furthermore, the sentence-level transformation could be used for word-level mapping without loss in word translation quality.

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Homograph Disambiguation through Selective Diacritic Restoration
Sawsan Alqahtani | Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop

Lexical ambiguity, a challenging phenomenon in all natural languages, is particularly prevalent for languages with diacritics that tend to be omitted in writing, such as Arabic. Omitting diacritics leads to an increase in the number of homographs: different words with the same spelling. Diacritic restoration could theoretically help disambiguate these words, but in practice, the increase in overall sparsity leads to performance degradation in NLP applications. In this paper, we propose approaches for automatically marking a subset of words for diacritic restoration, which leads to selective homograph disambiguation. Compared to full or no diacritic restoration, these approaches yield selectively-diacritized datasets that balance sparsity and lexical disambiguation. We evaluate the various selection strategies extrinsically on several downstream applications: neural machine translation, part-of-speech tagging, and semantic textual similarity. Our experiments on Arabic show promising results, where our devised strategies on selective diacritization lead to a more balanced and consistent performance in downstream applications.

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Scalable Cross-Lingual Transfer of Neural Sentence Embeddings
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)

We develop and investigate several cross-lingual alignment approaches for neural sentence embedding models, such as the supervised inference classifier, InferSent, and sequential encoder-decoder models. We evaluate three alignment frameworks applied to these models: joint modeling, representation transfer learning, and sentence mapping, using parallel text to guide the alignment. Our results support representation transfer as a scalable approach for modular cross-lingual alignment of neural sentence embeddings, where we observe better performance compared to joint models in intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations, particularly with smaller sets of parallel data.

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Efficient Sentence Embedding using Discrete Cosine Transform
Nada Almarwani | Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Vector averaging remains one of the most popular sentence embedding methods in spite of its obvious disregard for syntactic structure. While more complex sequential or convolutional networks potentially yield superior classification performance, the improvements in classification accuracy are typically mediocre compared to the simple vector averaging. As an efficient alternative, we propose the use of discrete cosine transform (DCT) to compress word sequences in an order-preserving manner. The lower order DCT coefficients represent the overall feature patterns in sentences, which results in suitable embeddings for tasks that could benefit from syntactic features. Our results in semantic probing tasks demonstrate that DCT embeddings indeed preserve more syntactic information compared with vector averaging. With practically equivalent complexity, the model yields better overall performance in downstream classification tasks that correlate with syntactic features, which illustrates the capacity of DCT to preserve word order information.

2018

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Unsupervised Word Mapping Using Structural Similarities in Monolingual Embeddings
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mahesh Mohan | Mona Diab
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6

Most existing methods for automatic bilingual dictionary induction rely on prior alignments between the source and target languages, such as parallel corpora or seed dictionaries. For many language pairs, such supervised alignments are not readily available. We propose an unsupervised approach for learning a bilingual dictionary for a pair of languages given their independently-learned monolingual word embeddings. The proposed method exploits local and global structures in monolingual vector spaces to align them such that similar words are mapped to each other. We show empirically that the performance of bilingual correspondents that are learned using our proposed unsupervised method is comparable to that of using supervised bilingual correspondents from a seed dictionary.

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Evaluation of Unsupervised Compositional Representations
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We evaluated various compositional models, from bag-of-words representations to compositional RNN-based models, on several extrinsic supervised and unsupervised evaluation benchmarks. Our results confirm that weighted vector averaging can outperform context-sensitive models in most benchmarks, but structural features encoded in RNN models can also be useful in certain classification tasks. We analyzed some of the evaluation datasets to identify the aspects of meaning they measure and the characteristics of the various models that explain their performance variance.

2016

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Learning Cross-lingual Representations with Matrix Factorization
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual and Cross-lingual Methods in NLP

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GWU NLP at SemEval-2016 Shared Task 1: Matrix Factorization for Crosslingual STS
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2015

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Robust Part-of-speech Tagging of Arabic Text
Hanan Aldarmaki | Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing