Bitext Name Tagging for Cross-lingual Entity Annotation Projection

Dongxu Zhang, Boliang Zhang, Xiaoman Pan, Xiaocheng Feng, Heng Ji, Weiran Xu


Abstract
Annotation projection is a practical method to deal with the low resource problem in incident languages (IL) processing. Previous methods on annotation projection mainly relied on word alignment results without any training process, which led to noise propagation caused by word alignment errors. In this paper, we focus on the named entity recognition (NER) task and propose a weakly-supervised framework to project entity annotations from English to IL through bitexts. Instead of directly relying on word alignment results, this framework combines advantages of rule-based methods and deep learning methods by implementing two steps: First, generates a high-confidence entity annotation set on IL side with strict searching methods; Second, uses this high-confidence set to weakly supervise the model training. The model is finally used to accomplish the projecting process. Experimental results on two low-resource ILs show that the proposed method can generate better annotations projected from English-IL parallel corpora. The performance of IL name tagger can also be improved significantly by training on the newly projected IL annotation set.
Anthology ID:
C16-1045
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
461–470
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1045
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongxu Zhang, Boliang Zhang, Xiaoman Pan, Xiaocheng Feng, Heng Ji, and Weiran Xu. 2016. Bitext Name Tagging for Cross-lingual Entity Annotation Projection. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 461–470, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Bitext Name Tagging for Cross-lingual Entity Annotation Projection (Zhang et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1045.pdf