Papers › Robust Cross-lingual Hypernymy Detection using Dependency Context

Robust Cross-lingual Hypernymy Detection using Dependency Context

30 Mar 2018NAACL 2018 6arXiv:1803.11291archive 2025-07-28

Shyam Upadhyay, Yogarshi Vyas, Marine Carpuat, Dan Roth

Cross-lingual Hypernymy Detection involves determining if a word in one language ("fruit") is a hypernym of a word in another language ("pomme" i.e. apple in French). The ability to detect hypernymy cross-lingually can aid in solving cross-lingual versions of tasks such as textual entailment and event coreference. We propose BISPARSE-DEP, a family of unsupervised approaches for cross-lingual hypernymy detection, which learns sparse, bilingual word embeddings based on dependency contexts. We show that BISPARSE-DEP can significantly improve performance on this task, compared to approaches based only on lexical context. Our approach is also robust, showing promise for low-resource settings: our dependency-based embeddings can be learned using a parser trained on related languages, with negligible loss in performance. We also crowd-source a challenging dataset for this task on four languages -- Russian, French, Arabic, and Chinese. Our embeddings and datasets are publicly available.

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Natural Language InferenceWord Embeddings

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