Abstract
Document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. Such aligned data can be used for a variety of NLP tasks from training cross-lingual representations to mining parallel data for machine translation. In this paper we develop an unsupervised scoring function that leverages cross-lingual sentence embeddings to compute the semantic distance between documents in different languages. These semantic distances are then used to guide a document alignment algorithm to properly pair cross-lingual web documents across a variety of low, mid, and high-resource language pairs. Recognizing that our proposed scoring function and other state of the art methods are computationally intractable for long web documents, we utilize a more tractable greedy algorithm that performs comparably. We experimentally demonstrate that our distance metric performs better alignment than current baselines outperforming them by 7% on high-resource language pairs, 15% on mid-resource language pairs, and 22% on low-resource language pairs.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.aacl-main.62
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Venue:
- AACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 616–625
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.62
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ahmed El-Kishky and Francisco Guzmán. 2020. Massively Multilingual Document Alignment with Cross-lingual Sentence-Mover’s Distance. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 616–625, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Massively Multilingual Document Alignment with Cross-lingual Sentence-Mover’s Distance (El-Kishky & Guzmán, AACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/2020.aacl-main.62.pdf