Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity of Words as the Similarity of Their Semantic Word Responses

Ivan Vulić and Marie-Francine Moens

We propose a new approach to identifying semantically similar words across languages. The approach is based on an idea that two words in different languages are similar if they are likely to generate similar words (which includes both source and target language words) as their top semantic word responses. Semantic word responding is a concept from cognitive science which addresses detecting most likely words that humans output as free word associations given some cue word. The method consists of two main steps: (1) it utilizes a probabilistic multilingual topic model trained on comparable data to learn and quantify the semantic word responses, (2) it provides ranked lists of similar words according to the similarity of their semantic word response vectors. We evaluate our approach in the task of bilingual lexicon extraction (BLE) for a variety of language pairs. We show that in the cross-lingual settings without any language pair dependent knowledge the response-based method of similarity is more robust and outperforms current state-of-the art methods that directly operate in the semantic space of latent cross-lingual concepts/topics.