Exploiting Cross-Lingual Representations For Natural Language Processing

Traditional approaches to supervised learning require a generous amount of labeled data for good generalization. While such annotation-heavy approaches have proven useful for some Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in high-resource languages (like English), they are unlikely to scale to languages where collecting labeled data is di cult and time-consuming. Translating supervision available in English is also not a viable solution, because developing a good machine translation system requires expensive to annotate resources which are not available for most languages. In this thesis, I argue that cross-lingual representations are an effective means of extending NLP tools to languages beyond English without resorting to generous amounts of annotated data or expensive machine translation. These representations can be learned in an inexpensive manner, often from signals completely unrelated to the task of interest. I begin with a review of different ways of inducing such representations using a variety of cross-lingual signals and study algorithmic approaches of using them in a diverse set of downstream tasks. Examples of such tasks covered in this thesis include learning representations to transfer a trained model across languages for document classification, assist in monolingual lexical semantics like word sense induction, identify asymmetric lexical relationships like hypernymy between words in different languages, or combining supervision across languages through a shared feature space for cross-lingual entity linking. In all these applications, the representations make information expressed in other languages available in English, while requiring minimal additional supervision in the language of interest

Concept and entity grounding using indirect supervision

Extracting and disambiguating entities and concepts is a crucial step toward understanding natural language text. In this thesis, we consider the problem of grounding concepts and entities mentioned in text to one or more knowledge bases (KBs). A well-studied scenario of this problem is the one in which documents are given in English and the goal is to identify concept and entity mentions, and find the corresponding entries the mentions refer to in Wikipedia. We extend this problem in two directions: First, we study identifying and grounding entities written in any language to the English Wikipedia. Second, we investigate using multiple KBs which do not contain rich textual and structural information Wikipedia does. These more involved settings pose a few additional challenges beyond those addressed in the standard English Wikification problem. Key among them is that no supervision is available to facilitate training machine learning models. The first extension, cross-lingual Wikification, introduces problems such as recognizing multilingual named entities mentioned in text, translating non-English names into English, and computing word similarity across languages. Since it is impossible to acquire manually annotated examples for all languages, building models for all languages in Wikipedia requires exploring indirect or incidental supervision signals which already exist in Wikipedia. For the second setting, we need to deal with the fact that most KBs do not contain the rich information Wikipedia has; consequently, the main supervision signal used to train Wikification rankers does not exist anymore. In this thesis, we show that supervision signals can be obtained by carefully examining the redundancy and relations between multiple KBs. By developing algorithms and models which harvest these incidental signals, we can achieve better performance on these tasks

Deep learning based semantic textual similarity for applications in translation technology

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the equivalence of meanings between two textual segments. It is a fundamental task for many natural language processing applications. In this study, we focus on employing STS in the context of translation technology. We start by developing models to estimate STS. We propose a new unsupervised vector aggregation-based STS method which relies on contextual word embeddings. We also propose a novel Siamese neural network based on efficient recurrent neural network units. We empirically evaluate various unsupervised and supervised STS methods, including these newly proposed methods in three different English STS datasets, two non- English datasets and a bio-medical STS dataset to list the best supervised and unsupervised STS methods. We then embed these STS methods in translation technology applications. Firstly we experiment with Translation Memory (TM) systems. We propose a novel TM matching and retrieval method based on STS methods that outperform current TM systems. We then utilise the developed STS architectures in translation Quality Estimation (QE). We show that the proposed methods are simple but outperform complex QE architectures and improve the state-of-theart results. The implementations of these methods have been released as open source

Entity-Oriented Search

This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book. The book is divided into three main parts, sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters. The first two chapters introduce readers to the basic concepts, provide an overview of entity-oriented search tasks, and present the various types and sources of data that will be used throughout the book. Part I deals with the core task of entity ranking: given a textual query, possibly enriched with additional elements or structural hints, return a ranked list of entities. This core task is examined in a number of different variants, using both structured and unstructured data collections, and numerous query formulations. In turn, Part II is devoted to the role of entities in bridging unstructured and structured data. Part III explores how entities can enable search engines to understand the concepts, meaning, and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and how they can provide rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents)—a process known as semantic search. The final chapter concludes the book by discussing the limitations of current approaches, and suggesting directions for future research. Researchers and graduate students are the primary target audience of this book. A general background in information retrieval is sufficient to follow the material, including an understanding of basic probability and statistics concepts as well as a basic knowledge of machine learning concepts and supervised learning algorithms