Translation inference through multi-lingual word embedding similarity

This paper describes our contribution to the Shared Task on Translation Inference across Dictionaries (TIAD-2019). In our approach, we construct a multi-lingual word embedding space by projecting new languages in the feature space of a language for which a pretrained embedding model exists. We use the similarity of the word embeddings to predict candidate translations. Even if our projection methodology is rather simplistic, our system outperforms the other participating systems with respect to the F1 measure for the language pairs which we predicted

Learning General Purpose Distributed Sentence Representations via Large Scale Multi-task Learning

A lot of the recent success in natural language processing (NLP) has been driven by distributed vector representations of words trained on large amounts of text in an unsupervised manner. These representations are typically used as general purpose features for words across a range of NLP problems. However, extending this success to learning representations of sequences of words, such as sentences, remains an open problem. Recent work has explored unsupervised as well as supervised learning techniques with different training objectives to learn general purpose fixed-length sentence representations. In this work, we present a simple, effective multi-task learning framework for sentence representations that combines the inductive biases of diverse training objectives in a single model. We train this model on several data sources with multiple training objectives on over 100 million sentences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that sharing a single recurrent sentence encoder across weakly related tasks leads to consistent improvements over previous methods. We present substantial improvements in the context of transfer learning and low-resource settings using our learned general-purpose representations.Comment: Accepted at ICLR 201