Why Overfitting Isn’t Always Bad: Retrofitting Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings to Dictionaries

Mozhi Zhang, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Michael J. Paul, Jordan Boyd-Graber


Abstract
Cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE) are often evaluated on bilingual lexicon induction (BLI). Recent CLWE methods use linear projections, which underfit the training dictionary, to generalize on BLI. However, underfitting can hinder generalization to other downstream tasks that rely on words from the training dictionary. We address this limitation by retrofitting CLWE to the training dictionary, which pulls training translation pairs closer in the embedding space and overfits the training dictionary. This simple post-processing step often improves accuracy on two downstream tasks, despite lowering BLI test accuracy. We also retrofit to both the training dictionary and a synthetic dictionary induced from CLWE, which sometimes generalizes even better on downstream tasks. Our results confirm the importance of fully exploiting training dictionary in downstream tasks and explains why BLI is a flawed CLWE evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.201
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2214–2220
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.201
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.201
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mozhi Zhang, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Michael J. Paul, and Jordan Boyd-Graber. 2020. Why Overfitting Isn’t Always Bad: Retrofitting Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings to Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2214–2220, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why Overfitting Isn’t Always Bad: Retrofitting Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings to Dictionaries (Zhang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.201.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928729