XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction

Yuwei Cao, William Groves, Tanay Kumar Saha, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes, Hao Peng, Philip Yu


Abstract
Temporal Expression Extraction (TEE) is essential for understanding time in natural language. It has applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering, information retrieval, and causal inference. To date, work in this area has mostly focused on English as there is a scarcity of labeled data for other languages. We propose XLTime, a novel framework for multilingual TEE. XLTime works on top of pre-trained language models and leverages multi-task learning to prompt cross-language knowledge transfer both from English and within the non-English languages. XLTime alleviates problems caused by a shortage of data in the target language. We apply XLTime with different language models and show that it outperforms the previous automatic SOTA methods on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque, by large margins. XLTime also closes the gap considerably on the handcrafted HeidelTime method.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.148
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1931–1942
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.148
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.148
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuwei Cao, William Groves, Tanay Kumar Saha, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes, Hao Peng, and Philip Yu. 2022. XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 1931–1942, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extraction (Cao et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.148.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.148.mp4
Code
 yuweicao-uic/xltime