5,325 research outputs found
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Meta Learning
Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance
recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve
downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual
applications, as most languages in the world are under-resourced. Here, we
consider the setting of training models on multiple different languages at the
same time, when little or no data is available for languages other than
English. We show that this challenging setup can be approached using
meta-learning, where, in addition to training a source language model, another
model learns to select which training instances are the most beneficial to the
first. We experiment using standard supervised, zero-shot cross-lingual, as
well as few-shot cross-lingual settings for different natural language
understanding tasks (natural language inference, question answering). Our
extensive experimental setup demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of
meta-learning for a total of 15 languages. We improve upon the state-of-the-art
for zero-shot and few-shot NLI (on MultiNLI and XNLI) and QA (on the MLQA
dataset). A comprehensive error analysis indicates that the correlation of
typological features between languages can partly explain when parameter
sharing learned via meta-learning is beneficial.Comment: Accepted as long paper in EMNLP2020 main conferenc
Universal Dependencies Parsing for Colloquial Singaporean English
Singlish can be interesting to the ACL community both linguistically as a
major creole based on English, and computationally for information extraction
and sentiment analysis of regional social media. We investigate dependency
parsing of Singlish by constructing a dependency treebank under the Universal
Dependencies scheme, and then training a neural network model by integrating
English syntactic knowledge into a state-of-the-art parser trained on the
Singlish treebank. Results show that English knowledge can lead to 25% relative
error reduction, resulting in a parser of 84.47% accuracies. To the best of our
knowledge, we are the first to use neural stacking to improve cross-lingual
dependency parsing on low-resource languages. We make both our annotation and
parser available for further research.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201
Neural Collective Entity Linking
Entity Linking aims to link entity mentions in texts to knowledge bases, and
neural models have achieved recent success in this task. However, most existing
methods rely on local contexts to resolve entities independently, which may
usually fail due to the data sparsity of local information. To address this
issue, we propose a novel neural model for collective entity linking, named as
NCEL. NCEL applies Graph Convolutional Network to integrate both local
contextual features and global coherence information for entity linking. To
improve the computation efficiency, we approximately perform graph convolution
on a subgraph of adjacent entity mentions instead of those in the entire text.
We further introduce an attention scheme to improve the robustness of NCEL to
data noise and train the model on Wikipedia hyperlinks to avoid overfitting and
domain bias. In experiments, we evaluate NCEL on five publicly available
datasets to verify the linking performance as well as generalization ability.
We also conduct an extensive analysis of time complexity, the impact of key
modules, and qualitative results, which demonstrate the effectiveness and
efficiency of our proposed method.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, COLING201
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