Hybrid Knowledge Transfer for Improved Cross-Lingual Event Detection via Hierarchical Sample Selection

Luis Guzman Nateras, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Nguyen


Abstract
In this paper, we address the Event Detection task under a zero-shot cross-lingual setting where a model is trained on a source language but evaluated on a distinct target language for which there is no labeled data available. Most recent efforts in this field follow a direct transfer approach in which the model is trained using language-invariant features and then directly applied to the target language. However, we argue that these methods fail to take advantage of the benefits of the data transfer approach where a cross-lingual model is trained on target-language data and is able to learn task-specific information from syntactical features or word-label relations in the target language. As such, we propose a hybrid knowledge-transfer approach that leverages a teacher-student framework where the teacher and student networks are trained following the direct and data transfer approaches, respectively. Our method is complemented by a hierarchical training-sample selection scheme designed to address the issue of noisy labels being generated by the teacher model. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on 9 morphologically-diverse target languages across 3 distinct datasets, highlighting the importance of exploiting the benefits of hybrid transfer.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.296
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5414–5427
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.296
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.296
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luis Guzman Nateras, Franck Dernoncourt, and Thien Nguyen. 2023. Hybrid Knowledge Transfer for Improved Cross-Lingual Event Detection via Hierarchical Sample Selection. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5414–5427, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hybrid Knowledge Transfer for Improved Cross-Lingual Event Detection via Hierarchical Sample Selection (Guzman Nateras et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.296.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.296.mp4