Abstract
Current practices in building new NLP models for low-resourced languages rely either on Machine Translation of training sets from better resourced languages or on cross-lingual transfer from them. Still we can see a considerable performance gap between the models originally trained within better resourced languages and the models transferred from them. In this study we test the possibility of (1) using natural annotation to build synthetic training sets from resources not initially designed for the target downstream task and (2) employing curriculum learning methods to select the most suitable examples from synthetic training sets. We test this hypothesis across seven Slavic languages and across three curriculum learning strategies on Named Entity Recognition as the downstream task. We also test the possibility of fine-tuning the synthetic resources to reflect linguistic properties, such as the grammatical case and gender, both of which are important for the Slavic languages. We demonstrate the possibility to achieve the mean F1 score of 0.78 across the three basic entities types for Belarusian starting from zero resources in comparison to the baseline of 0.63 using the zero-shot transfer from English. For comparison, the English model trained on the original set achieves the mean F1-score of 0.75. The experimental results are available from https://github.com/ValeraLobov/SlavNER- Anthology ID:
- 2022.coling-1.394
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- October
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- International Committee on Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4468–4480
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.394
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Valeriy Lobov, Alexandra Ivoylova, and Serge Sharoff. 2022. Applying Natural Annotation and Curriculum Learning to Named Entity Recognition for Under-Resourced Languages. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4468–4480, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Applying Natural Annotation and Curriculum Learning to Named Entity Recognition for Under-Resourced Languages (Lobov et al., COLING 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl-24-ws-corrections/2022.coling-1.394.pdf
- Code
- valeralobov/slavner