Cross-lingual Annotation Projection for Semantic Roles

This article considers the task of automatically inducing role-semantic annotations in the FrameNet paradigm for new languages. We propose a general framework that is based on annotation projection, phrased as a graph optimization problem. It is relatively inexpensive and has the potential to reduce the human effort involved in creating role-semantic resources. Within this framework, we present projection models that exploit lexical and syntactic information. We provide an experimental evaluation on an English-German parallel corpus which demonstrates the feasibility of inducing high-precision German semantic role annotation both for manually and automatically annotated English data. 1

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

Inducing Multilingual Text Analysis Tools Using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

International audienceThis work focuses on the rapid development of linguistic annotation tools for resource-poor languages. We experiment several cross-lingual annotation projection methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) models. The distinctive feature of our approach is that our multilingual word representation requires only a parallel corpus between the source and target language. More precisely, our method has the following characteristics: (a) it does not use word alignment information, (b) it does not assume any knowledge about foreign languages, which makes it applicable to a wide range of resource-poor languages, (c) it provides truly multilingual taggers. We investigate both uni-and bi-directional RNN models and propose a method to include external information (for instance low level information from POS) in the RNN to train higher level taggers (for instance, super sense taggers). We demonstrate the validity and genericity of our model by using parallel corpora (obtained by manual or automatic translation). Our experiments are conducted to induce cross-lingual POS and super sense taggers

FRASIMED: a Clinical French Annotated Resource Produced through Crosslingual BERT-Based Annotation Projection

Natural language processing (NLP) applications such as named entity recognition (NER) for low-resource corpora do not benefit from recent advances in the development of large language models (LLMs) where there is still a need for larger annotated datasets. This research article introduces a methodology for generating translated versions of annotated datasets through crosslingual annotation projection. Leveraging a language agnostic BERT-based approach, it is an efficient solution to increase low-resource corpora with few human efforts and by only using already available open data resources. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are often lacking when it comes to evaluating the quality and effectiveness of semi-automatic data generation strategies. The evaluation of our crosslingual annotation projection approach showed both effectiveness and high accuracy in the resulting dataset. As a practical application of this methodology, we present the creation of French Annotated Resource with Semantic Information for Medical Entities Detection (FRASIMED), an annotated corpus comprising 2'051 synthetic clinical cases in French. The corpus is now available for researchers and practitioners to develop and refine French natural language processing (NLP) applications in the clinical field (https://zenodo.org/record/8355629), making it the largest open annotated corpus with linked medical concepts in French

Entity Projection via Machine Translation for Cross-Lingual NER

Although over 100 languages are supported by strong off-the-shelf machine translation systems, only a subset of them possess large annotated corpora for named entity recognition. Motivated by this fact, we leverage machine translation to improve annotation-projection approaches to cross-lingual named entity recognition. We propose a system that improves over prior entity-projection methods by: (a) leveraging machine translation systems twice: first for translating sentences and subsequently for translating entities; (b) matching entities based on orthographic and phonetic similarity; and (c) identifying matches based on distributional statistics derived from the dataset. Our approach improves upon current state-of-the-art methods for cross-lingual named entity recognition on 5 diverse languages by an average of 4.1 points. Further, our method achieves state-of-the-art F_1 scores for Armenian, outperforming even a monolingual model trained on Armenian source data