Cross-Lingual Induction and Transfer of Verb Classes Based on Word Vector Space Specialisation

Ivan Vulić, Nikola Mrkšić, Anna Korhonen


Abstract
Existing approaches to automatic VerbNet-style verb classification are heavily dependent on feature engineering and therefore limited to languages with mature NLP pipelines. In this work, we propose a novel cross-lingual transfer method for inducing VerbNets for multiple languages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which demonstrates how the architectures for learning word embeddings can be applied to this challenging syntactic-semantic task. Our method uses cross-lingual translation pairs to tie each of the six target languages into a bilingual vector space with English, jointly specialising the representations to encode the relational information from English VerbNet. A standard clustering algorithm is then run on top of the VerbNet-specialised representations, using vector dimensions as features for learning verb classes. Our results show that the proposed cross-lingual transfer approach sets new state-of-the-art verb classification performance across all six target languages explored in this work.
Anthology ID:
D17-1270
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2546–2558
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1270
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1270
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ivan Vulić, Nikola Mrkšić, and Anna Korhonen. 2017. Cross-Lingual Induction and Transfer of Verb Classes Based on Word Vector Space Specialisation. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2546–2558, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Lingual Induction and Transfer of Verb Classes Based on Word Vector Space Specialisation (Vulić et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1270.pdf
Attachment:
 D17-1270.Attachment.zip
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