Learning Crosslingual Word Embeddings without Bilingual Corpora

Long Duong1, Hiroshi Kanayama2, Tengfei Ma3, Steven Bird4, Trevor Cohn4
1The University of Melbourne, 2IBM Research - Tokyo, 3IBM Research-Tokyo, 4University of Melbourne


Abstract

Crosslingual word embeddings represent lexical items from different languages in the same vector space, enabling transfer of NLP tools. However, previous attempts had expensive resource requirements, difficulty incorporating monolingual data or were unable to handle polysemy. We address these drawbacks in our method which takes advantage of a high coverage dictionary in an EM style training algorithm over monolingual corpora in two languages. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on bilingual lexicon induction task exceeding models using large bilingual corpora, and competitive results on the monolingual word similarity and cross-lingual document classification task.