Papers › Entity Projection via Machine Translation for Cross-Lingual NER

Entity Projection via Machine Translation for Cross-Lingual NER

31 Aug 2019IJCNLP 2019 11arXiv:1909.05356archive 2025-07-28

Alankar Jain, Bhargavi Paranjape, Zachary C. Lipton

Although over 100 languages are supported by strong off-the-shelf machine translation systems, only a subset of them possess large annotated corpora for named entity recognition. Motivated by this fact, we leverage machine translation to improve annotation-projection approaches to cross-lingual named entity recognition. We propose a system that improves over prior entity-projection methods by: (a) leveraging machine translation systems twice: first for translating sentences and subsequently for translating entities; (b) matching entities based on orthographic and phonetic similarity; and (c) identifying matches based on distributional statistics derived from the dataset. Our approach improves upon current state-of-the-art methods for cross-lingual named entity recognition on 5 diverse languages by an average of 4.1 points. Further, our method achieves state-of-the-art F_1 scores for Armenian, outperforming even a monolingual model trained on Armenian source data.

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Tasks

Cross-Lingual NERMachine TranslationNERNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)Translationnamed-entity-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Cross-Lingual NER CoNLL 2003 BiLSTM + CRF Dutch 69.9 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER CoNLL 2003 BiLSTM + CRF German 61.5 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Cross-Lingual NER CoNLL 2003 BiLSTM + CRF Spanish 74.5 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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