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Register a new userCCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs
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Added by
Ahmed El-Kishky
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Cross-lingual document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. In this paper, we exploit the signals embedded in URLs to label web documents at scale with an average precision of 94.5% across different language pairs. We mine sixty-eight snapshots of the Common Crawl corpus and identify web document pairs that are translations of each other. We release a new web dataset consisting of over 392 million URL pairs from Common Crawl covering documents in 8144 language pairs of which 137 pairs include English. In addition to curating this massive dataset, we introduce baseline methods that leverage cross-lingual representations to identify aligned documents based on their textual content. Finally, we demonstrate the value of this parallel documents dataset through a downstream task of mining parallel sentences and measuring the quality of machine translations from models trained on this mined data. Our objective in releasing this dataset is to foster new research in cross-lingual NLP across a variety of low, medium, and high-resource languages.
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Many information retrieval algorithms rely on the notion of a good distance that allows to efficiently compare objects of different nature. Recently, a new promising metric called Word Movers Distance was proposed to measure the divergence between text passages. In this paper, we demonstrate that this metric can be extended to incorporate term-weighting schemes and provide more accurate and computationally efficient matching between documents using entropic regularization. We evaluate the benefits of both extensions in the task of cross-lingual document retrieval (CLDR). Our experimental results on eight CLDR problems suggest that the proposed methods achieve remarkable improvements in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank compared to several baselines.
Dense retrieval has shown great success in passage ranking in English. However, its effectiveness in document retrieval for non-English languages remains unexplored due to the limitation in training resources. In this work, we explore different transfer techniques for document ranking from English annotations to multiple non-English languages. Our experiments on the test collections in six languages (Chinese, Arabic, French, Hindi, Bengali, Spanish) from diverse language families reveal that zero-shot model-based transfer using mBERT improves the search quality in non-English mono-lingual retrieval. Also, we find that weakly-supervised target language transfer yields competitive performances against the generation-based target language transfer that requires external translators and query generators.
Document alignment aims to identify pairs of documents in two distinct languages that are of comparable content or translations of each other. Such aligned data can be used for a variety of NLP tasks from training cross-lingual representations to mining parallel data for machine translation. In this paper we develop an unsupervised scoring function that leverages cross-lingual sentence embeddings to compute the semantic distance between documents in different languages. These semantic distances are then used to guide a document alignment algorithm to properly pair cross-lingual web documents across a variety of low, mid, and high-resource language pairs. Recognizing that our proposed scoring function and other state of the art methods are computationally intractable for long web documents, we utilize a more tractable greedy algorithm that performs comparably. We experimentally demonstrate that our distance metric performs better alignment than current baselines outperforming them by 7% on high-resource language pairs, 15% on mid-resource language pairs, and 22% on low-resource language pairs.
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Recent studies in zero-shot cross-lingual learning using multilingual models have falsified the previous hypothesis that shared vocabulary and joint pre-training are the keys to cross-lingual generalization. Inspired by this advancement, we introduce a cross-lingual transfer method for monolingual models based on domain adaptation. We study the effects of such transfer from four different languages to English. Our experimental results on GLUE show that the transferred models outperform the native English model independently of the source language. After probing the English linguistic knowledge encoded in the representations before and after transfer, we find that semantic information is retained from the source language, while syntactic information is learned during transfer. Additionally, the results of evaluating the transferred models in source language tasks reveal that their performance in the source domain deteriorates after transfer.
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