Graph-Based Multilingual Label Propagation for Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging

Ayyoob Imani, Silvia Severini, Masoud Jalili Sabet, François Yvon, Hinrich Schütze


Abstract
Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is an important component of the NLP pipeline, but many low-resource languages lack labeled data for training. An established method for training a POS tagger in such a scenario is to create a labeled training set by transferring from high-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel method for transferring labels from multiple high-resource source to low-resource target languages. We formalize POS tag projection as graph-based label propagation. Given translations of a sentence in multiple languages, we create a graph with words as nodes and alignment links as edges by aligning words for all language pairs. We then propagate node labels from source to target using a Graph Neural Network augmented with transformer layers. We show that our propagation creates training sets that allow us to train POS taggers for a diverse set of languages. When combined with enhanced contextualized embeddings, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised POS tagging of low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.102
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1577–1589
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.102
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.102
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ayyoob Imani, Silvia Severini, Masoud Jalili Sabet, François Yvon, and Hinrich Schütze. 2022. Graph-Based Multilingual Label Propagation for Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1577–1589, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Graph-Based Multilingual Label Propagation for Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging (Imani et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.102.pdf