Papers › Massively Multilingual Transfer for NER

Massively Multilingual Transfer for NER

1 Feb 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1902.00193archive 2025-07-28

Afshin Rahimi, Yuan Li, Trevor Cohn

In cross-lingual transfer, NLP models over one or more source languages are applied to a low-resource target language. While most prior work has used a single source model or a few carefully selected models, here we consider a `massive' setting with many such models. This setting raises the problem of poor transfer, particularly from distant languages. We propose two techniques for modulating the transfer, suitable for zero-shot or few-shot learning, respectively. Evaluating on named entity recognition, we show that our techniques are much more effective than strong baselines, including standard ensembling, and our unsupervised method rivals oracle selection of the single best individual model.

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Cross-Lingual TransferFew-Shot LearningLow Resource Named Entity RecognitionNERNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)named-entity-recognition

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