Cross-lingual Learning of Semantic Textual Similarity with Multilingual Word Representations

• Assessing the semantic similarity between sentences in different languages is challenging. We approach this problem by leveraging multilingual distributional word representations, where similar words in different languages are close to each other. The availability of parallel data allows us to train such representations on a large amount of languages. This allows us to leverage semantic similarity data for languages for which no such data exists. We train and evaluate on five language pairs, including English, Spanish, and Arabic. We are able to train wellperforming systems for several language pairs, without any labelled data for that language pair.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

word representations

multilingual NLP

semantic similarity estimation

natural language processing

datorlingvistik

Computational Linguistics

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)