Cross-Cultural Similarity Features for Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning of Pragmatically Motivated Tasks

Jimin Sun, Hwijeen Ahn, Chan Young Park, Yulia Tsvetkov, David R. Mortensen


Abstract
Much work in cross-lingual transfer learning explored how to select better transfer languages for multilingual tasks, primarily focusing on typological and genealogical similarities between languages. We hypothesize that these measures of linguistic proximity are not enough when working with pragmatically-motivated tasks, such as sentiment analysis. As an alternative, we introduce three linguistic features that capture cross-cultural similarities that manifest in linguistic patterns and quantify distinct aspects of language pragmatics: language context-level, figurative language, and the lexification of emotion concepts. Our analyses show that the proposed pragmatic features do capture cross-cultural similarities and align well with existing work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. We further corroborate the effectiveness of pragmatically-driven transfer in the downstream task of choosing transfer languages for cross-lingual sentiment analysis.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.204
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2403–2414
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.204
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.204
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jimin Sun, Hwijeen Ahn, Chan Young Park, Yulia Tsvetkov, and David R. Mortensen. 2021. Cross-Cultural Similarity Features for Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning of Pragmatically Motivated Tasks. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 2403–2414, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Cultural Similarity Features for Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning of Pragmatically Motivated Tasks (Sun et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.204.pdf
Code
 hwijeen/langrank +  additional community code