Learning to Represent Bilingual Dictionaries

Muhao Chen, Yingtao Tian, Haochen Chen, Kai-Wei Chang, Steven Skiena, Carlo Zaniolo


Abstract
Bilingual word embeddings have been widely used to capture the correspondence of lexical semantics in different human languages. However, the cross-lingual correspondence between sentences and words is less studied, despite that this correspondence can significantly benefit many applications such as crosslingual semantic search and textual inference. To bridge this gap, we propose a neural embedding model that leverages bilingual dictionaries. The proposed model is trained to map the lexical definitions to the cross-lingual target words, for which we explore with different sentence encoding techniques. To enhance the learning process on limited resources, our model adopts several critical learning strategies, including multi-task learning on different bridges of languages, and joint learning of the dictionary model with a bilingual word embedding model. We conduct experiments on two new tasks. In the cross-lingual reverse dictionary retrieval task, we demonstrate that our model is capable of comprehending bilingual concepts based on descriptions, and the proposed learning strategies are effective. In the bilingual paraphrase identification task, we show that our model effectively associates sentences in different languages via a shared embedding space, and outperforms existing approaches in identifying bilingual paraphrases.
Anthology ID:
K19-1015
Volume:
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Mohit Bansal, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
152–162
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1015
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K19-1015
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhao Chen, Yingtao Tian, Haochen Chen, Kai-Wei Chang, Steven Skiena, and Carlo Zaniolo. 2019. Learning to Represent Bilingual Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 152–162, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Represent Bilingual Dictionaries (Chen et al., CoNLL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K19-1015.pdf
Code
 muhaochen/bilingual_dictionaries