Learning Multilingual Word Embeddings in Latent Metric Space: A Geometric Approach

Pratik Jawanpuria, Arjun Balgovind, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Bamdev Mishra


Abstract
We propose a novel geometric approach for learning bilingual mappings given monolingual embeddings and a bilingual dictionary. Our approach decouples the source-to-target language transformation into (a) language-specific rotations on the original embeddings to align them in a common, latent space, and (b) a language-independent similarity metric in this common space to better model the similarity between the embeddings. Overall, we pose the bilingual mapping problem as a classification problem on smooth Riemannian manifolds. Empirically, our approach outperforms previous approaches on the bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity tasks. We next generalize our framework to represent multiple languages in a common latent space. Language-specific rotations for all the languages and a common similarity metric in the latent space are learned jointly from bilingual dictionaries for multiple language pairs. We illustrate the effectiveness of joint learning for multiple languages in an indirect word translation setting.
Anthology ID:
Q19-1007
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7
Month:
Year:
2019
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
107–120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q19-1007
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00257
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pratik Jawanpuria, Arjun Balgovind, Anoop Kunchukuttan, and Bamdev Mishra. 2019. Learning Multilingual Word Embeddings in Latent Metric Space: A Geometric Approach. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 7:107–120.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Multilingual Word Embeddings in Latent Metric Space: A Geometric Approach (Jawanpuria et al., TACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/Q19-1007.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/Q19-1007.mp4
Code
 anoopkunchukuttan/geomm +  additional community code