Cross-lingual Joint Entity and Word Embedding to Improve Entity Linking and Parallel Sentence Mining

Xiaoman Pan, Thamme Gowda, Heng Ji, Jonathan May, Scott Miller


Abstract
Entities, which refer to distinct objects in the real world, can be viewed as language universals and used as effective signals to generate less ambiguous semantic representations and align multiple languages. We propose a novel method, CLEW, to generate cross-lingual data that is a mix of entities and contextual words based on Wikipedia. We replace each anchor link in the source language with its corresponding entity title in the target language if it exists, or in the source language otherwise. A cross-lingual joint entity and word embedding learned from this kind of data not only can disambiguate linkable entities but can also effectively represent unlinkable entities. Because this multilingual common space directly relates the semantics of contextual words in the source language to that of entities in the target language, we leverage it for unsupervised cross-lingual entity linking. Experimental results show that CLEW significantly advances the state-of-the-art: up to 3.1% absolute F-score gain for unsupervised cross-lingual entity linking. Moreover, it provides reliable alignment on both the word/entity level and the sentence level, and thus we use it to mine parallel sentences for all (302, 2) language pairs in Wikipedia.
Anthology ID:
D19-6107
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo 2019)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Colin Cherry, Greg Durrett, George Foster, Reza Haffari, Shahram Khadivi, Nanyun Peng, Xiang Ren, Swabha Swayamdipta
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
56–66
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6107
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-6107
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoman Pan, Thamme Gowda, Heng Ji, Jonathan May, and Scott Miller. 2019. Cross-lingual Joint Entity and Word Embedding to Improve Entity Linking and Parallel Sentence Mining. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo 2019), pages 56–66, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Joint Entity and Word Embedding to Improve Entity Linking and Parallel Sentence Mining (Pan et al., 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6107.pdf