CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation

Jian Yang, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuwei Yin, Li Dong, Dongdong Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Zhoujun Li, Furu Wei


Abstract
Named entity recognition (NER) suffers from the scarcity of annotated training data, especially for low-resource languages without labeled data. Cross-lingual NER has been proposed to alleviate this issue by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages via aligned cross-lingual representations or machine translation results. However, the performance of cross-lingual NER methods is severely affected by the unsatisfactory quality of translation or label projection. To address these problems, we propose a Cross-lingual Entity Projection framework (CROP) to enable zero-shot cross-lingual NER with the help of a multilingual labeled sequence translation model. Specifically, the target sequence is first translated into the source language and then tagged by a source NER model. We further adopt a labeled sequence translation model to project the tagged sequence back to the target language and label the target raw sentence. Ultimately, the whole pipeline is integrated into an end-to-end model by the way of self-training. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms the previous strong baseline by a large margin of +3 7 F1 scores and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.34
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
486–496
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.34
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.34
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jian Yang, Shaohan Huang, Shuming Ma, Yuwei Yin, Li Dong, Dongdong Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Zhoujun Li, and Furu Wei. 2022. CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 486–496, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation (Yang et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.34.pdf