3,959 research outputs found
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework
Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies
heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call
centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer
support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses
great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from
native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve
the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system,
we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we
assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking
annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any
form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher,
which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and
transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We
specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus
and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies
accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the
teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and
achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc
Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations
Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically
equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence
pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be
trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our
semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface
features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for
neural machine translation.Comment: Accepted as a full paper to NAACL 201
Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with High-Quality Translated Training Corpus
Many efforts of research are devoted to semantic role labeling (SRL) which is
crucial for natural language understanding. Supervised approaches have achieved
impressing performances when large-scale corpora are available for
resource-rich languages such as English. While for the low-resource languages
with no annotated SRL dataset, it is still challenging to obtain competitive
performances. Cross-lingual SRL is one promising way to address the problem,
which has achieved great advances with the help of model transferring and
annotation projection. In this paper, we propose a novel alternative based on
corpus translation, constructing high-quality training datasets for the target
languages from the source gold-standard SRL annotations. Experimental results
on Universal Proposition Bank show that the translation-based method is highly
effective, and the automatic pseudo datasets can improve the target-language
SRL performances significantly.Comment: Accepted at ACL 202
Cross-lingual transfer learning and multitask learning for capturing multiword expressions
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Association for Computational Linguistics in Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019), available online: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-5119
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Recent developments in deep learning have prompted a surge of interest in the application of multitask and transfer learning to NLP problems. In this study, we explore for the first time, the application of transfer learning (TRL) and multitask learning (MTL) to the identification of Multiword Expressions (MWEs). For MTL, we exploit the shared syntactic information between MWE and dependency parsing models to jointly train a single model on both tasks. We specifically predict two types of labels: MWE and dependency parse. Our neural MTL architecture utilises the supervision of dependency parsing in lower layers and predicts MWE tags in upper layers. In the TRL scenario, we overcome the scarcity of data by learning a model on a larger MWE dataset and transferring the knowledge to a resource-poor setting in another language. In both scenarios, the resulting models achieved higher performance compared to standard neural approaches
Cross-Lingual Adaptation using Structural Correspondence Learning
Cross-lingual adaptation, a special case of domain adaptation, refers to the
transfer of classification knowledge between two languages. In this article we
describe an extension of Structural Correspondence Learning (SCL), a recently
proposed algorithm for domain adaptation, for cross-lingual adaptation. The
proposed method uses unlabeled documents from both languages, along with a word
translation oracle, to induce cross-lingual feature correspondences. From these
correspondences a cross-lingual representation is created that enables the
transfer of classification knowledge from the source to the target language.
The main advantages of this approach over other approaches are its resource
efficiency and task specificity.
We conduct experiments in the area of cross-language topic and sentiment
classification involving English as source language and German, French, and
Japanese as target languages. The results show a significant improvement of the
proposed method over a machine translation baseline, reducing the relative
error due to cross-lingual adaptation by an average of 30% (topic
classification) and 59% (sentiment classification). We further report on
empirical analyses that reveal insights into the use of unlabeled data, the
sensitivity with respect to important hyperparameters, and the nature of the
induced cross-lingual correspondences
Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarization
Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims
at generating a concise summary in a different target language. Unlike
monolingual summarization (MS), naturally occurring source-language documents
paired with target-language summaries are rare. To collect large-scale CLS
data, existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation.
However, the translated text is distinguished from the text originally written
in that language, i.e., translationese. In this paper, we first confirm that
different approaches of constructing CLS datasets will lead to different
degrees of translationese. Then we systematically investigate how
translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in
source documents or target summaries. In detail, we find that (1) the
translationese in documents or summaries of test sets might lead to the
discrepancy between human judgment and automatic evaluation; (2) the
translationese in training sets would harm model performance in real-world
applications; (3) though machine-translated documents involve translationese,
they are very useful for building CLS systems on low-resource languages under
specific training strategies. Lastly, we give suggestions for future CLS
research including dataset and model developments. We hope that our work could
let researchers notice the phenomenon of translationese in CLS and take it into
account in the future.Comment: Accepted to the Findings of EMNLP 202
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