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Title: Multi-Source Cross-Lingual Model Transfer: Learning What to Share
Modern NLP applications have enjoyed a great boost utilizing neural networks models. Such deep neural models, however, are not applicable to most human languages due to the lack of annotated training data for various NLP tasks. Cross-lingual transfer learning (CLTL) is a viable method for building NLP models for a low-resource target language by leveraging labeled data from other (source) languages. In this work, we focus on the multilingual transfer setting where training data in multiple source languages is leveraged to further boost target language performance. Unlike most existing methods that rely only on language-invariant features for CLTL, our approach coherently utilizes both language invariant and language-specific features at instance level. Our model leverages adversarial networks to learn language-invariant features, and mixture-of-experts models to dynamically exploit the similarity between the target language and each individual source language1. This enables our model to learn effectively what to share between various languages in the multilingual setup. Moreover, when coupled with unsupervised multilingual embeddings, our model can operate in a zero-resource setting where neither target language training data nor cross-lingual resources are available. Our model achieves significant performance gains over prior art, as shown in an extensive set of experiments over multiple text classification and sequence tagging.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1741441
NSF-PAR ID:
10113370
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 57th Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
3098–3112
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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