1 research outputs found
Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need!
Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse
structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this
work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for
assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity.
We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine)
translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into
German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection
and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for
cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and
almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that
annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or
cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at
\url{http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining}.Comment: Accepted at Coling 201