366 research outputs found
Cross-lingual Distillation for Text Classification
Cross-lingual text classification(CLTC) is the task of classifying documents
written in different languages into the same taxonomy of categories. This paper
presents a novel approach to CLTC that builds on model distillation, which
adapts and extends a framework originally proposed for model compression. Using
soft probabilistic predictions for the documents in a label-rich language as
the (induced) supervisory labels in a parallel corpus of documents, we train
classifiers successfully for new languages in which labeled training data are
not available. An adversarial feature adaptation technique is also applied
during the model training to reduce distribution mismatch. We conducted
experiments on two benchmark CLTC datasets, treating English as the source
language and German, French, Japan and Chinese as the unlabeled target
languages. The proposed approach had the advantageous or comparable performance
of the other state-of-art methods.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2017; Code available at
https://github.com/xrc10/cross-distil
Multilingual Models for Compositional Distributed Semantics
We present a novel technique for learning semantic representations, which
extends the distributional hypothesis to multilingual data and joint-space
embeddings. Our models leverage parallel data and learn to strongly align the
embeddings of semantically equivalent sentences, while maintaining sufficient
distance between those of dissimilar sentences. The models do not rely on word
alignments or any syntactic information and are successfully applied to a
number of diverse languages. We extend our approach to learn semantic
representations at the document level, too. We evaluate these models on two
cross-lingual document classification tasks, outperforming the prior state of
the art. Through qualitative analysis and the study of pivoting effects we
demonstrate that our representations are semantically plausible and can capture
semantic relationships across languages without parallel data.Comment: Proceedings of ACL 2014 (Long papers
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