11,552 research outputs found
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
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
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
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Meta Learning
Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance
recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve
downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual
applications, as most languages in the world are under-resourced. Here, we
consider the setting of training models on multiple different languages at the
same time, when little or no data is available for languages other than
English. We show that this challenging setup can be approached using
meta-learning, where, in addition to training a source language model, another
model learns to select which training instances are the most beneficial to the
first. We experiment using standard supervised, zero-shot cross-lingual, as
well as few-shot cross-lingual settings for different natural language
understanding tasks (natural language inference, question answering). Our
extensive experimental setup demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of
meta-learning for a total of 15 languages. We improve upon the state-of-the-art
for zero-shot and few-shot NLI (on MultiNLI and XNLI) and QA (on the MLQA
dataset). A comprehensive error analysis indicates that the correlation of
typological features between languages can partly explain when parameter
sharing learned via meta-learning is beneficial.Comment: Accepted as long paper in EMNLP2020 main conferenc
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