Unsupervised Induction of Cross-Lingual Semantic Relations

Mike Lewis, Mark Steedman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Creating a language-independent meaning representation would benefit many cross-lingual NLP tasks. We introduce the first unsupervised approach to this problem, learning clusters of semantically equivalent English and French relations between referring expressions, based on their named-entity arguments in large monolingual corpora. The clusters can be used as language-independent semantic relations, by mapping clustered expressions in different languages onto the same relation. Our approach needs no parallel text for training, but outperforms a baseline that uses machine translation on a cross-lingual question answering task. We also show how to use the semantics to improve the accuracy of machine translation, by using it in a simple reranker.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2013, 18-21 October 2013, Grand Hyatt Seattle, Seattle, Washington, USA, A meeting of SIGDAT, a Special Interest Group of the ACL
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages681-692
Number of pages12
Publication statusPublished - 2013

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Unsupervised Induction of Cross-Lingual Semantic Relations'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this