Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding
Ziheng Li, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. However, our research indicates that token-level alignment is also crucial in multilingual scenarios, which has not been fully explored previously. Based on our findings, we propose a dual-alignment pre-training (DAP) framework for cross-lingual sentence embedding that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. To achieve this, we introduce a novel representation translation learning (RTL) task, where the model learns to use one-side contextualized token representation to reconstruct its translation counterpart. This reconstruction objective encourages the model to embed translation information into the token representation. Compared to other token-level alignment methods such as translation language modeling, RTL is more suitable for dual encoder architectures and is computationally efficient. Extensive experiments on three sentence-level cross-lingual benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve sentence embedding. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChillingDream/DAP.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.191
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3466–3478
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.191
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.191
- Cite (ACL):
- Ziheng Li, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, and Qi Zhang. 2023. Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3466–3478, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding (Li et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2023.acl-long.191.pdf