Cross-Lingual Alignment of Contextual Word Embeddings, with Applications to Zero-shot Dependency Parsing

Tal Schuster, Ori Ram, Regina Barzilay, Amir Globerson
2019 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North  
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 contextdependent spaces. This
more » ... apping 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.
doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1162 dblp:conf/naacl/SchusterRBG19 fatcat:ns2bxzatkjdovnyqzxegtw53i4