Weakly Supervised Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition via Effective Annotation and Representation Projection

Jian Ni, Georgiana Dinu, Radu Florian


Abstract
The state-of-the-art named entity recognition (NER) systems are supervised machine learning models that require large amounts of manually annotated data to achieve high accuracy. However, annotating NER data by human is expensive and time-consuming, and can be quite difficult for a new language. In this paper, we present two weakly supervised approaches for cross-lingual NER with no human annotation in a target language. The first approach is to create automatically labeled NER data for a target language via annotation projection on comparable corpora, where we develop a heuristic scheme that effectively selects good-quality projection-labeled data from noisy data. The second approach is to project distributed representations of words (word embeddings) from a target language to a source language, so that the source-language NER system can be applied to the target language without re-training. We also design two co-decoding schemes that effectively combine the outputs of the two projection-based approaches. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches on both in-house and open NER data for several target languages. The results show that the combined systems outperform three other weakly supervised approaches on the CoNLL data.
Anthology ID:
P17-1135
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1470–1480
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1135
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1135
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jian Ni, Georgiana Dinu, and Radu Florian. 2017. Weakly Supervised Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition via Effective Annotation and Representation Projection. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1470–1480, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Weakly Supervised Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition via Effective Annotation and Representation Projection (Ni et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1135.pdf