Limitations of Cross-Lingual Learning from Image Search

Cross-lingual representation learning is an important step in making NLP scale to all the world's languages. Recent work on bilingual lexicon induction suggests that it is possible to learn cross-lingual representations of words based on similarities between images associated with these words. However, that work focused on the translation of selected nouns only. In our work, we investigate whether the meaning of other parts-of-speech, in particular adjectives and verbs, can be learned in the same way. We also experiment with combining the representations learned from visual data with embeddings learned from textual data. Our experiments across five language pairs indicate that previous work does not scale to the problem of learning cross-lingual representations beyond simple nouns

Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments

Most state-of-the-art text detection methods are specific to horizontal Latin text and are not fast enough for real-time applications. We introduce Segment Linking (SegLink), an oriented text detection method. The main idea is to decompose text into two locally detectable elements, namely segments and links. A segment is an oriented box covering a part of a word or text line; A link connects two adjacent segments, indicating that they belong to the same word or text line. Both elements are detected densely at multiple scales by an end-to-end trained, fully-convolutional neural network. Final detections are produced by combining segments connected by links. Compared with previous methods, SegLink improves along the dimensions of accuracy, speed, and ease of training. It achieves an f-measure of 75.0% on the standard ICDAR 2015 Incidental (Challenge 4) benchmark, outperforming the previous best by a large margin. It runs at over 20 FPS on 512x512 images. Moreover, without modification, SegLink is able to detect long lines of non-Latin text, such as Chinese.Comment: To Appear in CVPR 201

Lessons learned in multilingual grounded language learning

Recent work has shown how to learn better visual-semantic embeddings by leveraging image descriptions in more than one language. Here, we investigate in detail which conditions affect the performance of this type of grounded language learning model. We show that multilingual training improves over bilingual training, and that low-resource languages benefit from training with higher-resource languages. We demonstrate that a multilingual model can be trained equally well on either translations or comparable sentence pairs, and that annotating the same set of images in multiple language enables further improvements via an additional caption-caption ranking objective.Comment: CoNLL 201

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

Cross-language Text Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks From Scratch

Cross language classification is an important task in multilingual learning, where documents in different languages often share the same set of categories. The main goal is to reduce the labeling cost of training classification model for each individual language. The novel approach by using Convolutional Neural Networks for multilingual language classification is proposed in this article. It learns representation of knowledge gained from languages. Moreover, current method works for new individual language, which was not used in training. The results of empirical study on large dataset of 21 languages demonstrate robustness and competitiveness of the presented approach