Zihao Feng


2022

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Cross-lingual Feature Extraction from Monolingual Corpora for Low-resource Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction
Zihao Feng | Hailong Cao | Tiejun Zhao | Weixuan Wang | Wei Peng
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite their progress in high-resource language settings, unsupervised bilingual lexicon induction (UBLI) models often fail on corpora with low-resource distant language pairs due to insufficient initialization. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual feature extraction (CFE) method to learn the cross-lingual features from monolingual corpora for low-resource UBLI, enabling representations of words with the same meaning leveraged by the initialization step. By integrating cross-lingual representations with pre-trained word embeddings in a fully unsupervised initialization on UBLI, the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on low-resource language pairs (EN-VI, EN-TH, EN-ZH, EN-JA). The ablation study also proves that the learned cross-lingual features can enhance the representational ability and robustness of the existing embedding model.