Crosslingual and Multilingual Construction of Syntax-Based Vector Space Models

Jason Utt, Sebastian Padó


Abstract
Syntax-based distributional models of lexical semantics provide a flexible and linguistically adequate representation of co-occurrence information. However, their construction requires large, accurately parsed corpora, which are unavailable for most languages. In this paper, we develop a number of methods to overcome this obstacle. We describe (a) a crosslingual approach that constructs a syntax-based model for a new language requiring only an English resource and a translation lexicon; and (b) multilingual approaches that combine crosslingual with monolingual information, subject to availability. We evaluate on two lexical semantic benchmarks in German and Croatian. We find that the models exhibit complementary profiles: crosslingual models yield higher accuracies while monolingual models provide better coverage. In addition, we show that simple multilingual models can successfully combine their strengths.
Anthology ID:
Q14-1020
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 2
Month:
Year:
2014
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
245–258
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q14-1020
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00180
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jason Utt and Sebastian Padó. 2014. Crosslingual and Multilingual Construction of Syntax-Based Vector Space Models. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2:245–258.
Cite (Informal):
Crosslingual and Multilingual Construction of Syntax-Based Vector Space Models (Utt & Padó, TACL 2014)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/Q14-1020.pdf