1,314 research outputs found
Cross-Lingual Induction and Transfer of Verb Classes Based on Word Vector Space Specialisation
Existing approaches to automatic VerbNet-style verb classification are
heavily dependent on feature engineering and therefore limited to languages
with mature NLP pipelines. In this work, we propose a novel cross-lingual
transfer method for inducing VerbNets for multiple languages. To the best of
our knowledge, this is the first study which demonstrates how the architectures
for learning word embeddings can be applied to this challenging
syntactic-semantic task. Our method uses cross-lingual translation pairs to tie
each of the six target languages into a bilingual vector space with English,
jointly specialising the representations to encode the relational information
from English VerbNet. A standard clustering algorithm is then run on top of the
VerbNet-specialised representations, using vector dimensions as features for
learning verb classes. Our results show that the proposed cross-lingual
transfer approach sets new state-of-the-art verb classification performance
across all six target languages explored in this work.Comment: EMNLP 2017 (long paper
From Word to Sense Embeddings: A Survey on Vector Representations of Meaning
Over the past years, distributed semantic representations have proved to be
effective and flexible keepers of prior knowledge to be integrated into
downstream applications. This survey focuses on the representation of meaning.
We start from the theoretical background behind word vector space models and
highlight one of their major limitations: the meaning conflation deficiency,
which arises from representing a word with all its possible meanings as a
single vector. Then, we explain how this deficiency can be addressed through a
transition from the word level to the more fine-grained level of word senses
(in its broader acceptation) as a method for modelling unambiguous lexical
meaning. We present a comprehensive overview of the wide range of techniques in
the two main branches of sense representation, i.e., unsupervised and
knowledge-based. Finally, this survey covers the main evaluation procedures and
applications for this type of representation, and provides an analysis of four
of its important aspects: interpretability, sense granularity, adaptability to
different domains and compositionality.Comment: 46 pages, 8 figures. Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Researc
Cross-lingual Word Clusters for Direct Transfer of Linguistic Structure
It has been established that incorporating word cluster features derived from large unlabeled corpora can significantly improve prediction of linguistic structure. While previous work has focused primarily on English, we extend these results to other languages along two dimensions. First, we show that these results hold true for a number of languages across families. Second, and more interestingly, we provide an algorithm for inducing cross-lingual clusters and we show that features derived from these clusters significantly improve the accuracy of cross-lingual structure prediction. Specifically, we show that by augmenting direct-transfer systems with cross-lingual cluster features, the relative error of delexicalized dependency parsers, trained on English treebanks and transferred to foreign languages, can be reduced by up to 13%. When applying the same method to direct transfer of named-entity recognizers, we observe relative improvements of up to 26%
An algorithm for cross-lingual sense-clustering tested in a MT evaluation setting
Unsupervised sense induction methods offer a solution to the
problem of scarcity of semantic resources. These methods
automatically extract semantic information from textual data
and create resources adapted to specific applications and domains of interest. In this paper, we present a clustering algorithm for cross-lingual sense induction which generates
bilingual semantic inventories from parallel corpora. We describe the clustering procedure and the obtained resources. We then proceed to a large-scale evaluation by integrating the resources into a Machine Translation (MT) metric (METEOR). We show that the use of the data-driven sense-cluster inventories leads to better correlation with human judgments of translation quality, compared to precision-based metrics, and to improvements similar to those obtained when a handcrafted semantic resource is used
Adversarial Propagation and Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Word Vector Specialization
Semantic specialization is the process of fine-tuning pre-trained
distributional word vectors using external lexical knowledge (e.g., WordNet) to
accentuate a particular semantic relation in the specialized vector space.
While post-processing specialization methods are applicable to arbitrary
distributional vectors, they are limited to updating only the vectors of words
occurring in external lexicons (i.e., seen words), leaving the vectors of all
other words unchanged. We propose a novel approach to specializing the full
distributional vocabulary. Our adversarial post-specialization method
propagates the external lexical knowledge to the full distributional space. We
exploit words seen in the resources as training examples for learning a global
specialization function. This function is learned by combining a standard
L2-distance loss with an adversarial loss: the adversarial component produces
more realistic output vectors. We show the effectiveness and robustness of the
proposed method across three languages and on three tasks: word similarity,
dialog state tracking, and lexical simplification. We report consistent
improvements over distributional word vectors and vectors specialized by other
state-of-the-art specialization frameworks. Finally, we also propose a
cross-lingual transfer method for zero-shot specialization which successfully
specializes a full target distributional space without any lexical knowledge in
the target language and without any bilingual data.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201
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