This work focuses on the rapid development of linguistic annotation tools for resource-poor languages. We experiment several cross-lingual annotation projection methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) models. The distinctive feature of our approach is that our multilingual word representation requires only a parallel corpus between the source and target language. More precisely, our method has the following characteristics: (a) it does not use word alignment information, (b) it does not assume any knowledge about foreign languages, which makes it applicable to a wide range of resource-poor languages, (c) it provides truly multilingual taggers. We investigate both uni- and bi-directional RNN models and propose a method to include external information (for instance low level information from POS) in the RNN to train higher level taggers (for instance, super sense taggers). We demonstrate the validity and genericity of our model by using parallel corpora (obtained by manual or automatic translation). Our experiments are conducted to induce cross-lingual POS and super sense taggers.
To deal with this limitation, recent studies based on cross-lingual representation learning methods have been proposed to avoid using such pre-processed and noisy alignments for label projection. First, these approaches learn language-independent features, across many different languages @cite_19 @cite_12 @cite_37 @cite_39 @cite_41 @cite_31 . Then, the induced representation space is used to train NLP tools by exploiting labeled data from the source language and apply them in the target language. Cross-lingual representation learning approaches have achieved good results in different NLP applications such as cross-language SST and POS tagging @cite_41 , cross-language named entity recognition @cite_3 , cross-lingual document classification and lexical translation task @cite_31 , cross language dependency parsing @cite_19 @cite_37 and cross-language semantic role labeling @cite_17 .
@cite_37 @cite_41 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_19 @cite_31 @cite_12 @cite_17
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We study multi-source transfer parsing for resource-poor target languages; specifically methods for target language adaptation of delexicalized discriminative graph-based dependency parsers. We first show how recent insights on selective parameter sharing, based on typological and language-family features, can be applied to a discriminative parser by carefully decomposing its model features. We then show how the parser can be relexicalized and adapted using unlabeled target language data and a learning method that can incorporate diverse knowledge sources through ambiguous labelings. In the latter scenario, we exploit two sources of knowledge: arc marginals derived from the base parser in a self-training algorithm, and arc predictions from multiple transfer parsers in an ensemble-training algorithm. Our final model outperforms the state of the art in multi-source transfer parsing on 15 out of 16 evaluated languages. 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 . Recent work in learning bilingual representations tend to tailor towards achieving good performance on bilingual tasks, most often the crosslingual document classification (CLDC) evaluation, but to the detriment of preserving clustering structures of word representations monolingually. In this work, we propose a joint model to learn word representations from scratch that utilizes both the context coocurrence information through the monolingual component and the meaning equivalent signals from the bilingual constraint. Specifically, we extend the recently popular skipgram model to learn high quality bilingual representations efficiently. Our learned embeddings achieve a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 80.3 for the German to English CLDC task and a highly competitive performance of 90.7 for the other classification direction. At the same time, our models outperform best embeddings from past bilingual representation work by a large margin in the monolingual word similarity evaluation. 1 We consider the problem of using a bilingual dictionary to transfer lexico-syntactic information from a resource-rich source language to a resource-poor target language. In contrast to past work that used bitexts to transfer analyses of specific sentences at the token level, we instead use features to transfer the behavior of words at a type level. In a discriminative dependency parsing framework, our approach produces gains across a range of target languages, using two different low-resource training methodologies (one weakly supervised and one indirectly supervised) and two different dictionary sources (one manually constructed and one automatically constructed). We introduce BilBOWA (Bilingual Bag-of-Words without Alignments), a simple and computationally-efficient model for learning bilingual distributed representations of words which can scale to large monolingual datasets and does not require word-aligned parallel training data. Instead it trains directly on monolingual data and extracts a bilingual signal from a smaller set of raw-text sentence-aligned data. This is achieved using a novel sampled bag-of-words cross-lingual objective, which is used to regularize two noise-contrastive language models for efficient cross-lingual feature learning. We show that bilingual embeddings learned using the proposed model outperform state-of-the-art methods on a cross-lingual document classification task as well as a lexical translation task on WMT11 data. Distributed word representations (word embeddings) have recently contributed to competitive performance in language modeling and several NLP tasks. In this work, we train word embeddings for more than 100 languages using their corresponding Wikipedias. We quantitatively demonstrate the utility of our word embeddings by using them as the sole features for training a part of speech tagger for a subset of these languages. We find their performance to be competitive with near state-of-art methods in English, Danish and Swedish. Moreover, we investigate the semantic features captured by these embeddings through the proximity of word groupings. We will release these embeddings publicly to help researchers in the development and enhancement of multilingual applications. We argue that multilingual parallel data provides a valuable source of indirect supervision for induction of shallow semantic representations. Specifically, we consider unsupervised induction of semantic roles from sentences annotated with automatically-predicted syntactic dependency representations and use a state-of-the-art generative Bayesian non-parametric model. At inference time, instead of only seeking the model which explains the monolingual data available for each language, we regularize the objective by introducing a soft constraint penalizing for disagreement in argument labeling on aligned sentences. We propose a simple approximate learning algorithm for our set-up which results in efficient inference. When applied to German-English parallel data, our method obtains a substantial improvement over a model trained without using the agreement signal, when both are tested on non-parallel sentences.