English

Context-Aware Cross-Lingual Mapping

Computation and Language 2019-04-02 v2

Abstract

Cross-lingual word vectors are typically obtained by fitting an orthogonal matrix that maps the entries of a bilingual dictionary from a source to a target vector space. Word vectors, however, are most commonly used for sentence or document-level representations that are calculated as the weighted average of word embeddings. In this paper, we propose an alternative to word-level mapping that better reflects sentence-level cross-lingual similarity. We incorporate context in the transformation matrix by directly mapping the averaged embeddings of aligned sentences in a parallel corpus. We also implement cross-lingual mapping of deep contextualized word embeddings using parallel sentences with word alignments. In our experiments, both approaches resulted in cross-lingual sentence embeddings that outperformed context-independent word mapping in sentence translation retrieval. Furthermore, the sentence-level transformation could be used for word-level mapping without loss in word translation quality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.03243,
  title  = {Context-Aware Cross-Lingual Mapping},
  author = {Hanan Aldarmaki and Mona Diab},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.03243},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

NAACL-HLT 2019 (short paper). 5 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:01:51.706Z