Neural Cross-Lingual Relation Extraction Based on Bilingual Word Embedding Mapping
This addresses the problem of data scarcity in NLP for resource-poor languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing embedding and model transfer techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of transferring relation extraction models from resource-rich to resource-poor languages by proposing a method based on bilingual word embedding mapping, achieving very good performance across multiple target languages using only a small bilingual dictionary of 1K word pairs.
Relation extraction (RE) seeks to detect and classify semantic relationships between entities, which provides useful information for many NLP applications. Since the state-of-the-art RE models require large amounts of manually annotated data and language-specific resources to achieve high accuracy, it is very challenging to transfer an RE model of a resource-rich language to a resource-poor language. In this paper, we propose a new approach for cross-lingual RE model transfer based on bilingual word embedding mapping. It projects word embeddings from a target language to a source language, so that a well-trained source-language neural network RE model can be directly applied to the target language. Experiment results show that the proposed approach achieves very good performance for a number of target languages on both in-house and open datasets, using a small bilingual dictionary with only 1K word pairs.