Deep Multitask Learning for Semantic Dependency Parsing

We present a deep neural architecture that parses sentences into three semantic dependency graph formalisms. By using efficient, nearly arc-factored inference and a bidirectional-LSTM composed with a multi-layer perceptron, our base system is able to significantly improve the state of the art for semantic dependency parsing, without using hand-engineered features or syntax. We then explore two multitask learning approaches---one that shares parameters across formalisms, and one that uses higher-order structures to predict the graphs jointly. We find that both approaches improve performance across formalisms on average, achieving a new state of the art. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/Noahs-ARK/NeurboParser.Comment: Proceedings of ACL 201

Polyglot: Distributed Word Representations for Multilingual NLP

Distributed word representations (word embeddings) have recently contributed to competitive performance in language modeling and several NLP tasks. In this work, we train word embeddings for more than 100 languages using their corresponding Wikipedias. We quantitatively demonstrate the utility of our word embeddings by using them as the sole features for training a part of speech tagger for a subset of these languages. We find their performance to be competitive with near state-of-art methods in English, Danish and Swedish. Moreover, we investigate the semantic features captured by these embeddings through the proximity of word groupings. We will release these embeddings publicly to help researchers in the development and enhancement of multilingual applications.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning CoNLL'201

Cross-lingual transfer learning and multitask learning for capturing multiword expressions

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Association for Computational Linguistics in Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019), available online: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-5119 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Recent developments in deep learning have prompted a surge of interest in the application of multitask and transfer learning to NLP problems. In this study, we explore for the first time, the application of transfer learning (TRL) and multitask learning (MTL) to the identification of Multiword Expressions (MWEs). For MTL, we exploit the shared syntactic information between MWE and dependency parsing models to jointly train a single model on both tasks. We specifically predict two types of labels: MWE and dependency parse. Our neural MTL architecture utilises the supervision of dependency parsing in lower layers and predicts MWE tags in upper layers. In the TRL scenario, we overcome the scarcity of data by learning a model on a larger MWE dataset and transferring the knowledge to a resource-poor setting in another language. In both scenarios, the resulting models achieved higher performance compared to standard neural approaches

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

Introduction to the special issue on cross-language algorithms and applications

With the increasingly global nature of our everyday interactions, the need for multilingual technologies to support efficient and efective information access and communication cannot be overemphasized. Computational modeling of language has been the focus of Natural Language Processing, a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence. One of the current challenges for this discipline is to design methodologies and algorithms that are cross-language in order to create multilingual technologies rapidly. The goal of this JAIR special issue on Cross-Language Algorithms and Applications (CLAA) is to present leading research in this area, with emphasis on developing unifying themes that could lead to the development of the science of multi- and cross-lingualism. In this introduction, we provide the reader with the motivation for this special issue and summarize the contributions of the papers that have been included. The selected papers cover a broad range of cross-lingual technologies including machine translation, domain and language adaptation for sentiment analysis, cross-language lexical resources, dependency parsing, information retrieval and knowledge representation. We anticipate that this special issue will serve as an invaluable resource for researchers interested in topics of cross-lingual natural language processing.Postprint (published version