A robust self-learning method for fully unsupervised cross-lingual mappings of word embeddings

Mikel Artetxe, Gorka Labaka, Eneko Agirre


Abstract
Recent work has managed to learn cross-lingual word embeddings without parallel data by mapping monolingual embeddings to a shared space through adversarial training. However, their evaluation has focused on favorable conditions, using comparable corpora or closely-related languages, and we show that they often fail in more realistic scenarios. This work proposes an alternative approach based on a fully unsupervised initialization that explicitly exploits the structural similarity of the embeddings, and a robust self-learning algorithm that iteratively improves this solution. Our method succeeds in all tested scenarios and obtains the best published results in standard datasets, even surpassing previous supervised systems. Our implementation is released as an open source project at https://github.com/artetxem/vecmap.
Anthology ID:
P18-1073
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
789–798
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1073
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1073
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mikel Artetxe, Gorka Labaka, and Eneko Agirre. 2018. A robust self-learning method for fully unsupervised cross-lingual mappings of word embeddings. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 789–798, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A robust self-learning method for fully unsupervised cross-lingual mappings of word embeddings (Artetxe et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1073.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1073.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-1073.mp4
Code
 artetxem/vecmap +  additional community code