16 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
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
Post-Specialisation: Retrofitting Vectors of Words Unseen in Lexical Resources
Word vector specialisation (also known as retrofitting) is a portable, light-weight approach to fine-tuning arbitrary distributional word vector spaces by injecting external knowledge from rich lexical resources such as WordNet. By design, these post-processing methods only update the vectors of words occurring in external lexicons, leaving the representations of all unseen words intact. In this paper, we show that constraint-driven vector space specialisation can be extended to unseen words. We propose a novel post-specialisation method that: a) preserves the useful linguistic knowledge for seen words; while b) propagating this external signal to unseen words in order to improve their vector representations as well. Our post-specialisation approach explicits a non-linear specialisation function in the form of a deep neural network by learning to predict specialised vectors from their original distributional counterparts. The learned function is then used to specialise vectors of unseen words. This approach, applicable to any post-processing model, yields considerable gains over the initial specialisation models both in intrinsic word similarity tasks, and in two downstream tasks: dialogue state tracking and lexical text simplification. The positive effects persist across three languages, demonstrating the importance of specialising the full vocabulary of distributional word vector spaces.https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N18-104
Semantic Specialisation of Distributional Word Vector Spaces using Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Constraints
We present Attract-Repel, an algorithm for improving the semantic quality of word vectors by injecting constraints extracted from lexical resources. Attract-Repel facilitates the use of constraints from mono- and cross-lingual resources, yielding semantically specialised cross-lingual vector spaces. Our evaluation shows that the method can make use of existing cross-lingual lexicons to construct high-quality vector spaces for a plethora of different languages, facilitating semantic transfer from high- to lower-resource ones. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with state-of-the-art results on semantic similarity datasets in six languages. We next show that Attract-Repel-specialised vectors boost performance in the downstream task of dialogue state tracking (DST) across multiple languages. Finally, we show that cross-lingual vector spaces produced by our algorithm facilitate the training of multilingual DST models, which brings further performance improvements.Ivan Vulic, Roi Reichart and Anna Korhonen are supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL (number 648909). Roi Reichart is also supported by the Intel-ICRI grant: Hybrid Models for Minimally Supervised Information Extraction from Conversations