GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction
Wasi Ahmad, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in AAAI, 2021.
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Abstract
Prevalent approaches in cross-lingual relation and event extraction use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with universal dependency parses to learn language-agnostic representations such that models trained on one language can be applied to other languages. However, GCNs lack in modeling long-range dependencies or disconnected words in the dependency tree. To address this challenge, we propose to utilize the self-attention mechanism where we explicitly fuse structural information to learn the dependencies between words at different syntactic distances. We introduce GATE, a Graph Attention Transformer Encoder, and test its cross-lingual transferability on relation and event extraction tasks. We perform rigorous experiments on the widely used ACE05 dataset that includes three typologically different languages: English, Chinese, and Arabic. The evaluation results show that GATE outperforms three recently proposed methods by a large margin. Our detailed analysis reveals that due to the reliance on syntactic dependencies, GATE produces robust representations that facilitate transfer across languages.
Bib Entry
@inproceedings{ahmad2021gate, author = {Ahmad, Wasi and Peng, Nanyun and Chang, Kai-Wei}, title = {GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction}, booktitle = {AAAI}, year = {2021} }
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GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction
Wasi Ahmad, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in AAAI, 2021.
Full Text Abstract BibTeX DetailsPrevalent approaches in cross-lingual relation and event extraction use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with universal dependency parses to learn language-agnostic representations such that models trained on one language can be applied to other languages. However, GCNs lack in modeling long-range dependencies or disconnected words in the dependency tree. To address this challenge, we propose to utilize the self-attention mechanism where we explicitly fuse structural information to learn the dependencies between words at different syntactic distances. We introduce GATE, a Graph Attention Transformer Encoder, and test its cross-lingual transferability on relation and event extraction tasks. We perform rigorous experiments on the widely used ACE05 dataset that includes three typologically different languages: English, Chinese, and Arabic. The evaluation results show that GATE outperforms three recently proposed methods by a large margin. Our detailed analysis reveals that due to the reliance on syntactic dependencies, GATE produces robust representations that facilitate transfer across languages.
@inproceedings{ahmad2021gate, author = {Ahmad, Wasi and Peng, Nanyun and Chang, Kai-Wei}, title = {GATE: Graph Attention Transformer Encoder for Cross-lingual Relation and Event Extraction}, booktitle = {AAAI}, year = {2021} }
Target Language-Aware Constrained Inference for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing
Tao Meng, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2019.
Full Text BibTeX Details@inproceedings{meng2019target, title = {Target Language-Aware Constrained Inference for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing}, author = {Meng, Tao and Peng, Nanyun and Chang, Kai-Wei}, booktitle = {2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)}, year = {2019} }
Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing with Unlabeled Auxiliary Languages
Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in The 2019 SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2019.
Full Text BibTeX Details@inproceedings{ahmad2019cross, title = {Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing with Unlabeled Auxiliary Languages}, author = {Ahmad, Wasi Uddin and Zhang, Zhisong and Ma, Xuezhe and Chang, Kai-Wei and Peng, Nanyun}, booktitle = {The 2019 SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)}, year = {2019} }
On difficulties of cross-lingual transfer with order differences: A case study on dependency parsing
Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Eduard Hovy, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2019.
Full Text BibTeX Details@inproceedings{ahmad2019difficulties, title = {On difficulties of cross-lingual transfer with order differences: A case study on dependency parsing}, author = {Ahmad, Wasi Uddin and Zhang, Zhisong and Ma, Xuezhe and Hovy, Eduard and Chang, Kai-Wei and Peng, Nanyun}, booktitle = {Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)}, year = {2019} }