We present a novel cross-lingual transfer method for paradigm completion, the task of mapping a lemma to its inflected forms, using a neural encoder-decoder model, the state of the art for the monolingual task. We use labeled data from a high-resource language to increase performance on a low-resource language. In experiments on 21 language pairs from four different language families, we obtain up to 58% higher accuracy than without transfer and show that even zero-shot and one-shot learning are possible. We further find that the degree of language relatedness strongly influences the ability to transfer morphological knowledge.
@article{arxiv.1704.00052,
title = {One-Shot Neural Cross-Lingual Transfer for Paradigm Completion},
author = {Katharina Kann and Ryan Cotterell and Hinrich Schütze},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.00052},
year = {2017}
}