Bilingual Lexicon Extraction with Temporal Distributed Word Representation from Comparable Corpora

Abstract. Distributed word representation has been found to be highly effective to extract a bilingual lexicon from comparable corpora by a simple linear transformation. However, polysemous words often vary their meanings at different time points in the corresponding corpora. A single word representation which is learned from the whole corpora can't express the temporal change of the word meaning very well. This paper proposes a simple solution which exploits the temporal distributed word representation for polysemous words. The experimental results confirm that the proposed solution can offer better performance on the Englishto-Chinese bilingual lexicon extraction task

Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

A deep learning approach to bilingual lexicon induction in the biomedical domain.

BACKGROUND: Bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) is an important task in the biomedical domain as translation resources are usually available for general language usage, but are often lacking in domain-specific settings. In this article we consider BLI as a classification problem and train a neural network composed of a combination of recurrent long short-term memory and deep feed-forward networks in order to obtain word-level and character-level representations. RESULTS: The results show that the word-level and character-level representations each improve state-of-the-art results for BLI and biomedical translation mining. The best results are obtained by exploiting the synergy between these word-level and character-level representations in the classification model. We evaluate the models both quantitatively and qualitatively. CONCLUSIONS: Translation of domain-specific biomedical terminology benefits from the character-level representations compared to relying solely on word-level representations. It is beneficial to take a deep learning approach and learn character-level representations rather than relying on handcrafted representations that are typically used. Our combined model captures the semantics at the word level while also taking into account that specialized terminology often originates from a common root form (e.g., from Greek or Latin)

D7.1. Criteria for evaluation of resources, technology and integration.

This deliverable defines how evaluation is carried out at each integration cycle in the PANACEA project. As PANACEA aims at producing large scale resources, evaluation becomes a critical and challenging issue. Critical because it is important to assess the quality of the results that should be delivered to users. Challenging because we prospect rather new areas, and through a technical platform: some new methodologies will have to be explored or old ones to be adapted

From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning

Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning. We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency, which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses (in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Researc

Character-level and syntax-level models for low-resource and multilingual natural language processing

There are more than 7000 languages in the world, but only a small portion of them benefit from Natural Language Processing resources and models. Although languages generally present different characteristics, “cross-lingual bridges” can be exploited, such as transliteration signals and word alignment links. Such information, together with the availability of multiparallel corpora and the urge to overcome language barriers, motivates us to build models that represent more of the world’s languages. This thesis investigates cross-lingual links for improving the processing of low-resource languages with language-agnostic models at the character and syntax level. Specifically, we propose to (i) use orthographic similarities and transliteration between Named Entities and rare words in different languages to improve the construction of Bilingual Word Embeddings (BWEs) and named entity resources, and (ii) exploit multiparallel corpora for projecting labels from high- to low-resource languages, thereby gaining access to weakly supervised processing methods for the latter. In the first publication, we describe our approach for improving the translation of rare words and named entities for the Bilingual Dictionary Induction (BDI) task, using orthography and transliteration information. In our second work, we tackle BDI by enriching BWEs with orthography embeddings and a number of other features, using our classification-based system to overcome script differences among languages. The third publication describes cheap cross-lingual signals that should be considered when building mapping approaches for BWEs since they are simple to extract, effective for bootstrapping the mapping of BWEs, and overcome the failure of unsupervised methods. The fourth paper shows our approach for extracting a named entity resource for 1340 languages, including very low-resource languages from all major areas of linguistic diversity. We exploit parallel corpus statistics and transliteration models and obtain improved performance over prior work. Lastly, the fifth work models annotation projection as a graph-based label propagation problem for the part of speech tagging task. Part of speech models trained on our labeled sets outperform prior work for low-resource languages like Bambara (an African language spoken in Mali), Erzya (a Uralic language spoken in Russia’s Republic of Mordovia), Manx (the Celtic language of the Isle of Man), and Yoruba (a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria and surrounding countries)

Bilingual lexicon induction by learning to combine word-level and character-level representations

We study the problem of bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) in a setting where some translation resources are available, but unknown translations are sought for certain, possibly domain-specific terminology. We frame BLI as a classification problem for which we design a neural network based classification architecture composed of recurrent long short-term memory and deep feed forward networks. The results show that word- and character-level representations each improve state-of-the-art results for BLI, and the best results are obtained by exploiting the synergy between these word- and character-level representations in the classification model