XLPT-AMR: Cross-Lingual Pre-Training via Multi-Task Learning for Zero-Shot AMR Parsing and Text Generation

Dongqin Xu, Junhui Li, Muhua Zhu, Min Zhang, Guodong Zhou


Abstract
Due to the scarcity of annotated data, Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) research is relatively limited and challenging for languages other than English. Upon the availability of English AMR dataset and English-to- X parallel datasets, in this paper we propose a novel cross-lingual pre-training approach via multi-task learning (MTL) for both zeroshot AMR parsing and AMR-to-text generation. Specifically, we consider three types of relevant tasks, including AMR parsing, AMR-to-text generation, and machine translation. We hope that knowledge gained while learning for English AMR parsing and text generation can be transferred to the counterparts of other languages. With properly pretrained models, we explore four different finetuning methods, i.e., vanilla fine-tuning with a single task, one-for-all MTL fine-tuning, targeted MTL fine-tuning, and teacher-studentbased MTL fine-tuning. Experimental results on AMR parsing and text generation of multiple non-English languages demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms a strong baseline of pre-training approach, and greatly advances the state of the art. In detail, on LDC2020T07 we have achieved 70.45%, 71.76%, and 70.80% in Smatch F1 for AMR parsing of German, Spanish, and Italian, respectively, while for AMR-to-text generation of the languages, we have obtained 25.69, 31.36, and 28.42 in BLEU respectively. We make our code available on github https://github.com/xdqkid/XLPT-AMR.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.73
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
896–907
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.73
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.73
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongqin Xu, Junhui Li, Muhua Zhu, Min Zhang, and Guodong Zhou. 2021. XLPT-AMR: Cross-Lingual Pre-Training via Multi-Task Learning for Zero-Shot AMR Parsing and Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 896–907, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
XLPT-AMR: Cross-Lingual Pre-Training via Multi-Task Learning for Zero-Shot AMR Parsing and Text Generation (Xu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.73.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.73.mp4