Neural Cross-Lingual Event Detection with Minimal Parallel Resources

Jian Liu, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao


Abstract
The scarcity in annotated data poses a great challenge for event detection (ED). Cross-lingual ED aims to tackle this challenge by transferring knowledge between different languages to boost performance. However, previous cross-lingual methods for ED demonstrated a heavy dependency on parallel resources, which might limit their applicability. In this paper, we propose a new method for cross-lingual ED, demonstrating a minimal dependency on parallel resources. Specifically, to construct a lexical mapping between different languages, we devise a context-dependent translation method; to treat the word order difference problem, we propose a shared syntactic order event detector for multilingual co-training. The efficiency of our method is studied through extensive experiments on two standard datasets. Empirical results indicate that our method is effective in 1) performing cross-lingual transfer concerning different directions and 2) tackling the extremely annotation-poor scenario.
Anthology ID:
D19-1068
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
738–748
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1068
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1068
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jian Liu, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, and Jun Zhao. 2019. Neural Cross-Lingual Event Detection with Minimal Parallel Resources. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 738–748, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Cross-Lingual Event Detection with Minimal Parallel Resources (Liu et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1068.pdf