No Arabic abstract
We propose a multilingual model to recognize Big Five Personality traits from text data in four different languages: English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. Our analysis shows that words having a similar semantic meaning in different languages do not necessarily correspond to the same personality traits. Therefore, we propose a personality alignment method, GlobalTrait, which has a mapping for each trait from the source language to the target language (English), such that words that correlate positively to each trait are close together in the multilingual vector space. Using these aligned embeddings for training, we can transfer personality related training features from high-resource languages such as English to other low-resource languages, and get better multilingual results, when compared to using simple monolingual and unaligned multilingual embeddings. We achieve an average F-score increase (across all three languages except English) from 65 to 73.4 (+8.4), when comparing our monolingual model to multilingual using CNN with personality aligned embeddings. We also show relatively good performance in the regression tasks, and better classification results when evaluating our model on a separate Chinese dataset.
Distributed representations of meaning are a natural way to encode covariance relationships between words and phrases in NLP. By overcoming data sparsity problems, as well as providing information about semantic relatedness which is not available in discrete representations, distributed representations have proven useful in many NLP tasks. Recent work has shown how compositional semantic representations can successfully be applied to a number of monolingual applications such as sentiment analysis. At the same time, there has been some initial success in work on learning shared word-level representations across languages. We combine these two approaches by proposing a method for learning distributed representations in a multilingual setup. Our model learns to assign similar embeddings to aligned sentences and dissimilar ones to sentence which are not aligned while not requiring word alignments. We show that our representations are semantically informative and apply them to a cross-lingual document classification task where we outperform the previous state of the art. Further, by employing parallel corpora of multiple language pairs we find that our model learns representations that capture semantic relationships across languages for which no parallel data was used.
There has been significant interest recently in learning multilingual word embeddings -- in which semantically similar words across languages have similar embeddings. State-of-the-art approaches have relied on expensive labeled data, which is unavailable for low-resource languages, or have involved post-hoc unification of monolingual embeddings. In the present paper, we investigate the efficacy of multilingual embeddings learned from weakly-supervised image-text data. In particular, we propose methods for learning multilingual embeddings using image-text data, by enforcing similarity between the representations of the image and that of the text. Our experiments reveal that even without using any expensive labeled data, a bag-of-words-based embedding model trained on image-text data achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art on crosslingual semantic similarity tasks.
Word embeddings, which represent a word as a point in a vector space, have become ubiquitous to several NLP tasks. A recent line of work uses bilingual (two languages) corpora to learn a different vector for each sense of a word, by exploiting crosslingual signals to aid sense identification. We present a multi-view Bayesian non-parametric algorithm which improves multi-sense word embeddings by (a) using multilingual (i.e., more than two languages) corpora to significantly improve sense embeddings beyond what one achieves with bilingual information, and (b) uses a principled approach to learn a variable number of senses per word, in a data-driven manner. Ours is the first approach with the ability to leverage multilingual corpora efficiently for multi-sense representation learning. Experiments show that multilingual training significantly improves performance over monolingual and bilingual training, by allowing us to combine different parallel corpora to leverage multilingual context. Multilingual training yields comparable performance to a state of the art mono-lingual model trained on five times more training data.
In this paper, we advance the current state-of-the-art method for debiasing monolingual word embeddings so as to generalize well in a multilingual setting. We consider different methods to quantify bias and different debiasing approaches for monolingual as well as multilingual settings. We demonstrate the significance of our bias-mitigation approach on downstream NLP applications. Our proposed methods establish the state-of-the-art performance for debiasing multilingual embeddings for three Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu in addition to English. We believe that our work will open up new opportunities in building unbiased downstream NLP applications that are inherently dependent on the quality of the word embeddings used.
We introduce a novel method for multilingual transfer that utilizes deep contextual embeddings, pretrained in an unsupervised fashion. While contextual embeddings have been shown to yield richer representations of meaning compared to their static counterparts, aligning them poses a challenge due to their dynamic nature. To this end, we construct context-independent variants of the original monolingual spaces and utilize their mapping to derive an alignment for the context-dependent spaces. This mapping readily supports processing of a target language, improving transfer by context-aware embeddings. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for zero-shot and few-shot learning of dependency parsing. Specifically, our method consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on 6 tested languages, yielding an improvement of 6.8 LAS points on average.