8,130 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
Combining Multiple Methods for the Automatic Construction of Multilingual WordNets
This paper explores the automatic construction of a multilingual Lexical
Knowledge Base from preexisting lexical resources. First, a set of automatic
and complementary techniques for linking Spanish words collected from
monolingual and bilingual MRDs to English WordNet synsets are described.
Second, we show how resulting data provided by each method is then combined to
produce a preliminary version of a Spanish WordNet with an accuracy over 85%.
The application of these combinations results on an increment of the extracted
connexions of a 40% without losing accuracy. Both coarse-grained (class level)
and fine-grained (synset assignment level) confidence ratios are used and
evaluated. Finally, the results for the whole process are presented.Comment: 7 pages, 4 postscript figure
Natural language processing
Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems
Towards a Universal Wordnet by Learning from Combined Evidenc
Lexical databases are invaluable sources of knowledge about words and their meanings, with numerous applications in areas like NLP, IR, and AI. We propose a methodology for the automatic construction of a large-scale multilingual lexical database where words of many languages are hierarchically organized in terms of their meanings and their semantic relations to other words. This resource is bootstrapped from WordNet, a well-known English-language resource. Our approach extends WordNet with around 1.5 million meaning links for 800,000 words in over 200 languages, drawing on evidence extracted from a variety of resources including existing (monolingual) wordnets, (mostly bilingual) translation dictionaries, and parallel corpora. Graph-based scoring functions and statistical learning techniques are used to iteratively integrate this information and build an output graph. Experiments show that this wordnet has a high level of precision and coverage, and that it can be useful in applied tasks such as cross-lingual text classification
Using WordNet for Building WordNets
This paper summarises a set of methodologies and techniques for the fast
construction of multilingual WordNets. The English WordNet is used in this
approach as a backbone for Catalan and Spanish WordNets and as a lexical
knowledge resource for several subtasks.Comment: 8 pages, postscript file. In workshop on Usage of WordNet in NL
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